I haven't seen a single comment here that wasn't rebutted in the original article. Of course, it's always better to mouth platitudes from talking points and say tl;dr than to actually read the thing and... you know... be challenged. It's the geek-arrogant way (also covered nicely in the article, BTW).

The other 9900 artists that weren't popular enough to get in the record industry are now getting heard. They're just starting to get a cut now, via spotify or whatever

Not really. Power laws still hold. And, unless you are signed with a major and get enough tracks played via Spotify, you don't get a check.

Of course, each response I've seen in this thread is covered with a rebuttal in the article, which in typical geek-arrogance manner (which is also covered in the article), will never be read - so much better to pontificate from your talking points than to be challenged.

It didn't gain support back then; it won't gain support now.

The bottom line is that people have an inherent distrust of those who are smarter than them, worrying that the other person might use superior intelligence to take advantage of them. They'd much rather have someone who might be less smart, but that they can understand, in charge than someone who might do a better job, but whose actions are incomprehensible (and, thus, unpredictable) to them. Welcome to our politics.

With a big fossil fuel plant or a hydro dam, you get 90% or more of the rated output, and outages are rare.

With a big solar PV plant, you get 1/3 to 1/4 the rated maximum output, and outages happen nightly

With a big wind farm, you get 30% of rated maximum, if you're lucky, and long periods of calm happen more frequently than you'd like.

For example, England has been working on wind power for the last decade or so. The results have not been good.

The article didn't cover any of his work with the agile methodology community and his role as one of the three inventors (with Kent Beck and Ron Jeffries) of the eXtreme Programming (XP) methodology and the practices surrounding it (many of which were used in agile methodologies other than XP). To me that's a lot more important than CRC cards.

But, having known Ward for a very long time, I think his most notable contribution is his being a nice guy - humble as well as brilliant, and always willing to share. He is one of the unsung geniuses of the computing world and deserves a lot more attention than he normally gets.