Secret Pleasures of Open Source

I think one of the little pleasures of running open source software is the non-corporate tone of code comments and documentation, which can sometimes sound like this cool SysAdmin sitting you next to you in the data center, smoking a cigarette and reading The Economist…

Most of the features discussed in this article are only available to you if you are running Apache 1.2 or later. Of course, if you are not running Apache 1.2 or later, you need to upgrade immediately, if not sooner. Go on. Do it now. We’ll wait. [from the Apache docs]

A bit like Zeldman, no? This tone even carries through to O’Reilly’s articles online, where the irony of controlling Apache via the Mac UI is not lost…

Because we’ve made changes to Apache’s configuration file, we now need to restart Apache. The easiest way to do this is via our Sharing preference panel. Much like we started the sharing preference in part one of this series, we can stop and start to enable our changes. Do this now. Chuckle once or twice, if you must.