In June of 2005, I finished reading
"The Professor and the Madman"
by Simon Winchester,
which is an intriguing story of two significant contributors to the
Oxford English Dictionary, or OED. I
first heard this book mentioned in an interview on the
Charlie Rose show, and it
sounded interesting, so I bought a paperback copy,
and it was indeed an interesting read.
I wrote these thoughts down then, but neglected to post them until now. That
was likely in part because others beat me to the punch. In particular, I
think I remember listening to a presentation by
[Nat Friedman](http://nat.org) on the topic at around that time. In any
case, I stumbled today over the text I wrote back then, and thought the words
were still worth sharing.
The most interesting thing I learned in reading this book wasn't
actually about the principal characters, but instead involves a speech given
by
Richard Chenevix Trench
to the Philological Society,
entitled "On Some Deficiencies in Our English Dictionaries." This
is the talk that eventually led to the creation of the OED, and the intriguing
bit to me is an idea Trench proposed that was new at the time, but absolutely
fundamental to the Open Source & Linux world today. Trench well understood
that an undertaking of such magnitude as compilation
of an exhaustive dictionary of the English language, detailing the history
and lifetime of each word illustrated with many example of usage from existing
literature, could never be accomplished by one individual. Instead, he
proposed explicitly involving a large group of unpaid volunteer
contributors. Winchester claims that while this may sound obvious today,
that this idea had never been put forward before for such an undertaking.
Absolutely brilliant.
As an up-close observer of the evolution of the community approach to software
development and maintenance, I couldn't help but draw connections. We are
today engaged in an equally grand effort that may well have an
enduring impact, that fundamentally would not be possible to
accomplish without the contributions of an astoundingly diverse array of
unpaid volunteer contributors...
[[!tag tags/books]]