Tools that Shape Us

I just finished watching Linus’s recent talk on git at Google. One of the things that I always liked about Google Video was the ability to directly download the video to my desktop or iPod or PSP. Now Google Tech Talks has moved to YouTube and that feature is no longer available directly on the website. Quite a shame.

Neverthess if you haven’t listened to Linus’s talk, it’s worth taking the time to watch. I use Subversion a lot myself, for Apache, personal projects, JadeTower projects, even this website is backed in Subversion. I’ve often thought about switching to a distributed system, but have never felt like the specific benefits outweighed the cost of switching tools. This is particularly true for most of my personal projects and website where I use Subversion primarily for backup and synchronization.

However I wondered about introducing a distributed revision control system to Apache. The ASF is a pretty conservative group of geeks, so I see such a move as very unlikely. My interest in the idea isn’t so much technical as it is social. I wonder how a distributed system would change the way the ASF works. For example, commit access isn’t a big issue with distributed systems. Experimental (even revolutionary) branches are much easier. I imagine that the switch from a central to distributed model would have a deep impact on the way the ASF works. Maybe not immediately, but certainly over the long term.

It’s interesting how tools can shape organizations by their feature bounderies - what they make easy and what they make hard. Consider tools for general data such as Excel or databases. The features of these tools dictate what’s easy, what’s possible, and how data is shared and how we collaborate. This is in fact one of the key things we’re considering at JadeTower - how tools for data shape us and what we can do to take more power out of the hands of the tools and back into the hands of people.