VCs Back Surprising New Prokofy Open Source System Experiment

Prokofy with new OS penguin friend preparing to reverse-engineer his forked dual-licensed spaghetti code and let it into the wild.

Astute Twitter drillers will have already noticed that something has been afoot for SLebrity SLogger Prokofy Neva -- a veritable man-bites-dog-bites-bytes story in the works for weeks, tipsters told us tonight. Venture capitalists and tech moguls have been following Prokofy and chatting him up on the popular Twitter service, sending him quiet DMs of approval, and circling the monocled Second Life gadfly with increasing regularity in the virtual worlds of Twitter and Second Life.

The secret began leaking out today when several FriendFeeds and Twitters were put together to reveal that a wildly viral new start-up is being bankrolled by some of Silicon-Valley-and-Alley's most innovative venture capitalists, with the Infinite Antagonist at the center of the perfect storm.

Yes, now it can be told -- Prokofy is announcing today a new open-source, free socialware project, the Prokofy Opensource Criticism (POX) platform that will replicate Prokofy nearly infinitely and indefinitely to any forums, blog, chat room, sim or time-wasting social media platform of your choice 24/7/365/1000. The venture has received Series Q financing of $1 trillion Lindens.

Shocked journalists waited outside Prok's Seafood in Baileya, peppering the noted banned agitator as to why he was turning against his lifelong cause of opposing opensource software and freebies.

"I thought it would be more effective if I opensourced myself to fight the opensource movement," Neva commented. "Sort of like boring from within, as Trotsky would put it".

Zha Ewry, IBMer and AWGroupies leader, reached for comment, said she was already busy on making POX interoperable with other web-wide criticizing systems:  "[16:34:24] <zha.ewry> I htink I left out chicken driven tic tac toe solvers [16:34:53] <zha.ewry> I want the scope to stretch from qwqaq to opensim and back, tho."

Never a one to shrink from boring from within with his excessively long posts, dubbed "whinescrapers" in SL, Neva said that he thought his new project was absolutely brilliant and would help undermine the opensouce community for good.

"I take as my inspiration the famous quotation from Marx about plowing in the morning and criticizing after supper -- except I just keep the after-supper part," Neva explained.

"The system works flawlessly because it's so simple," the nattering nabob of negativity noted. "You just take a few words like "bolshevik" or "technocommunism" or "collectivist" and put them into more or less coherent short sentences, then copy and paste to any forums about opensource software, virtual worlds, or social media. "No moving parts -- no bugs -- these were all worked out during the Cold War in the 1980s." 

A venture capitalist who preferred not to be named said he decided to bankroll the contradictory conundrum of a Prokofyian opensourced platform after trying other ideas on for size.

"The first time Prokofy called me a 'bolshevik,' I tried to take him head on with a snappy Twitter -- but it only fueled his posting passion," the VC said. "I considered just paying him a whole bunch of money to shut up -- but I wasn't sure that would work," he lamented.

"It was then that I decided that the best thing to do with Prokofy was to wait until he obsessively placed comment no. 337 on an old blog I had written back in September 2008, *and answer him*," the tech angel noted. "Nobody noticed, nobody cared, but Prokofy felt he had been served. I then realized that this could be replicated endlessly."

Another Silicon Valley investor, contacted about the POX project said, "I decided to back Prokofy after noticing that there just wasn't anybody around to take on Cory Doctorow and tell him to stop undermining Western civilization and pick on something his own size," the backer, who asked not to be identified, said at a conference this week. "I realized that if we could get the Prokofy POX to spread across platforms through the opensource model, soon, it would become so ubiquitous that nobody would notice it. They'd stop reacting!" he exclaimed.

We caught up with Prokofy at his famous seafood restaurant, where he was sweeping out some grief prims from the latest PN attack. While Prokofy has signed an NDA with himself about the project at this stage, he felt he could break it in order to spark more news coverage.

"What I'm doing is opensourcing myself, basically," said Prokofy. "And as many know, opensourcing has a lot of advantages. First, I get to make myself Benevolent Dictator for Life -- well, forever," said the forums freak.

"I call it Software-as-Nuisance," he said amiably. "My first job as BDL is to not let anyone else on the project to clutter it up with all their bug reports and such," he said. "I started a JIRA -- but then I, as the author, closed it with deep prejudice," Prokofy commented, refrencing the arcane bug-tracking system of SL.

"So my plan now is to have a drama, and then refuse to post my nightly builds on the SVN thinger, you know. that thingie you are supposed to do?" said Neva, who has absolutely no knowledge of computer coding languages. "Then, leak it to Hammie," he added.

"In opensourcing myself, I will come to a fork, and then fork the project off. After that, I can claim that now I don't have to satisfy the BDM license. Er, I mean the OGL license. Wait. I mean the BDSM license. Well, you know that thing you're supposed to -- I won't be doing it," he chuckled.

"When that's done, I'll be able to issue myself as a dual-license operation, and pick up the VC cash waiting, and then...and then..." he paused looking up the sky to see if any more griefers were flying by...

"...what I thought I would do is after I have locked myself up behind a forked proprietary iteration, I will hack myself and reverse engineer myself!" Neva said confidently. "I think that should cover up the trail pretty well, and then I can sell consulting services on top of that tangled spaghetti mess of code, with parmesan on top!"

An industry insider, asked to comment on the viability of the project, said he though it wouldn't scale and was holding back from involvement in the project at this time.

"Prokofy is occasionally funny or even insightful with his sharp critiques in Second Life," the Valley veteran explained. "But once you try to take him out to the thousands of Gov 2.0 sites springing up like kudzu, he doesn't scale. Digital Beltway insiders are puzzled why a fictional character from a game is pestering them with rants about technocommunism -- these are people who never read the Gulag and aren't even terribly sure what communism 1.0 is, let alone technocommunism," he added.

Whether or not the Prokofy Open Criticism System -- known as POX by enthusiastic volunteers already clustering around the project in hopeful anticipation of getting to patch -- can develop or scale is something that remains to be seen.

"You can blame it all on me," Philip Linden said on his profile.

Comments

[Elanthius Flagstaff]

This is excellent news. I'm already planning on porting POX to AmigaBASIC so I can automate arguing on FidoNET.

[Micha Sass]

Superb project Prokofy. All I need to do is search/replace 'technocommunist' with 'capitalist pig', 'bolshevik' with 'money grubber' and 'collectivist' with 'elitist' and I could create the perfect Prokofy adversary bot. Excellent!! ..automated, endless and never making any progress.

[Melissa Yeuxdoux]

May I suggest Malbolge (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malbolge) as the appropriate language for implementation?

[melponeme_k]

April Fool! XD

That is a great avatar and I like your penguin.

[sam]

ok

[Dale Innis]

Agnew references ftw!

We're getting old, Prokofy... :)

[Eirynne Sieyes]

Shhhhhh..... I was one of the investors. Lol!

[Dahlia]

I want svn commit access! :D

[EZ Parx]

"SLebrity SLogger Prokofy Neva" - remember it is vital to change hands every 7 strokes

[raivo pommer-eesti.www.google.ee]

Raivo Pommer-eesti-www.google.ee

raimo1@hot.ee

Witschaftkrise 2008-2015-Pensionkrise u.a.

Im Kampf gegen die Wirtschafts- und Finanzkrise hat die Europäische Zentralbank (EZB) den Leitzins im Euro-Raum auf ein Rekordtief gesenkt. Der wichtigste Zins zur Versorgung der Kreditwirtschaft mit Zentralbankgeld verringert sich um weitere 0,25 Prozentpunkte auf 1,25 Prozent.

Das teilte die EZB nach ihrer Ratssitzung in Frankfurt mit. Das ist der niedrigste Stand in der Geschichte der Notenbank. Experten hatten mit einer deutlicheren Senkung auf 1,0 Prozent gerechnet.

EZB-Präsident Jean-Claude Trichet hatte Anfang dieser Woche auf eine weitere Verschlechterung der konjunkturellen Lage hingewiesen. Niedrigere Zinsen verbilligen Kredite für Unternehmen und Verbraucher und können so Investitionen und das Wirtschaftswachstum insgesamt anschieben. Seit Oktober hatte die EZB den Leitzins damit bereits um insgesamt 3,0 Punkte verringert. Eine Null-Zins-Politik wie sie etwa in den USA derzeit gilt, lehnt die EZB bislang ab.

Mit Spannung wird erwartet, wie sich Trichet bei der EZB- Pressekonferenz am Nachmittag zu einem möglichen Kauf von Staats- und Unternehmensanleihen äußern wird. Die US-Notenbank Fed und die Bank of England nutzen dieses Instrument bereits mit dem Ziel, das Zinsniveau direkt zu drücken.

[Prokofy Neva]

We've been over this a million times, Yumi. Second Life still -- and even more so than ever! -- represents a free economy with less friction to start a real business than anything I know of online of this nature. The fact that it didn't do that *just for you* or some small set of newbies you sought out to validate your own bad experience doesn't mean that daily, the million or more US transacting in this world (!) isn't going to new people who put out something to sell *that day* and begin the climb to making it.

I marvel that I myself, making completely ridiculous and crappy stuff without any ability, am able to sell little $5 t-shirts or $10 blankets or $1 trinkets and cover SL costs. It's truly an amazing machine, and your radio channel permanently tuned to the college angst station on this can't hide that.

Macs may be used by "anybody" if they just happened to get one cheaper. But its the Mac freaks and geeks who insist that every platform provide one. THAT sort of niche lobbying and freakiness doesn't happen with the casual person who got a laptop.

People tell me privately that they don't think Blue Mars "can scale" -- the story of all virtual worlds. They say the Cry2 engine "can't scale" with this much usage, i.e. the 10,000 people on a server is some kind of sanitized beta testing aberration that isn't going to work in the wild of actual usage. There's also a frequent complaint to me about this world being viewable only on Vista machines.

To which I can say, well, so what? A high-end more expensive and better virtual world will have content creators all over it trying to make a dime and people will still go there -- they are willing to spend an awful lot of money on Second Life, you know, $100 US prefabs for $1000 private islands doesn't faze quite a few people one bit. Those kind of people will migrate if for any reason SL stops meeting their needs, performance-wise, or in some other elusive political or social fashion, like the widespread but not very focused agida on the adult grid concept coming.

As for the land program, it doesn't appear to be an open auction, no, nor a land economy that sustains the rest of the economy. That's because these makers are not making a world with an integrated economy, but a platform upon which some people's personal economies benefit, and the industry as a whole can say it added X millions to the industry.

That's another reason why even if it can scale, it might not grow -- the lure of making a buck through some easy thing is very strong and fills up Second Life like the Wild West.

[Helpful Blogger]

hey prokofy dunno what is up but both IE and Firefox have been consistently reporting your site as an "attack site". I think some of your advertising is bad.

[Prokofy Neva]

No, I think you're just making that up. If it were true, I'd see it myself in IE or Firefox when I pull up the site. Nobody else is reporting this.

[Prokofy Neva]

http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=secondthoughts.typepad.com

No problems reported.

[Helpful Blogger]

Ahhh, found the problem. One of your ads was regged as a "bad" site, Firefox screamed about that. No big, nothing you can do to fix.