"As the IT industry matures I can see a tendency to make everything Serious, Business Responsible, Grownup, etc. I don't like this development of things"
I guess it depends on your point of view, but I personally love the fact that: a) my field is becoming more grown up, which means more recognition of its importance to the world, and b) the field is growing up, meaning the people who nowadays hold huge amounts of power over many other people, are taking this power more seriously.
I also don't think it's a problem to still have fun in our field - but there should be professional limits. When some engineers get together to build an engine that goes into a car, I'm all for them having fun while doing it, and making jokes, etc. But I also want them to be professional and for the end product to do its job. Usually the two don't conflict. In cases like the "nor for Evil" license, some people think they did conflict. Perfectly valid for Crockford to do it, perfectly valid for other people to say "this kind of humor means we can't use your product, much as we'd like to".
Replying to this post and its parent: In the world of distributions there is CentOS/RHEL for the blue shirted suit wearers and me on week days. Then there is Arch/Antix/Absolute and the truly wonderful #! and Puredyne/Dynebolic (which both appear to have died a death) as well as blag linux for the ones who want to do slightly mad stuff.
I suppose over time, we will have the same split in applications and services. All of 'em will use the project that Torvalds manages, which is why I imagine he lets off steam in irrelevant directions.
I guess it depends on your point of view, but I personally love the fact that: a) my field is becoming more grown up, which means more recognition of its importance to the world, and b) the field is growing up, meaning the people who nowadays hold huge amounts of power over many other people, are taking this power more seriously.
I also don't think it's a problem to still have fun in our field - but there should be professional limits. When some engineers get together to build an engine that goes into a car, I'm all for them having fun while doing it, and making jokes, etc. But I also want them to be professional and for the end product to do its job. Usually the two don't conflict. In cases like the "nor for Evil" license, some people think they did conflict. Perfectly valid for Crockford to do it, perfectly valid for other people to say "this kind of humor means we can't use your product, much as we'd like to".