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Alan Cox clearly doesn't understand copyright -- what is that baloney about it being invented by oppressive regimes for censor?

As other people have already said - Alan is right.

A good introduction to the history of copyright law can be found in the first part of the article Copyright in a frictionless world by Brendan Scott.

Copyright law gives authors an incentive to produce.

Does this statement of yours signify that you don't agree, or never agreed, with Eben Moglen's econodwarf argument?

Theorize away! Academics will build their arguments and even create detailed demographies, without a demonstrable conclusion. And still, the development will continue, undisturbed.

1. Hackers who write open source software seem to do so where there is no mature market for that software (i.e., they do it for free because no one will pay them to do it, not because they are motivated more by ego gratification than by money, as ESR suggests).

2. Funding by government and academic bodies has significantly contributed to the development of open source software, and to that extent government intervention in the software market (i.e., by directly or indirectly subsidizing the writing of open source software) may be desirable. (Contra ESR?)

3. To the extent that software companies try to co-opt open source developers by hiring them, they undermine themselves by encouraging more people to become open source developers (i.e., so they can get hired).

4. Programmers in countries such as Canada and Scandinavia contribute more per capita to free software than programmers in the USA, perhaps because there isn't a ready market for their skills in their home countries, which suggests that wealthier countries won't necessarily move toward developing more open source software. The breakdown of labor market barriers in a united Europe may therefore affect the rate of development of open source software (i.e., by encouraging those programmers to go where there are jobs rather than stay in grad school hacking kernels or whatever).

5. It might be a useful strategy for some software companies to permit some level of piracy rather than crack down on all piracy and thereby encourage development of open source alternatives.

P.S. Most of this is econ terminology, not poli sci.

Anyway, the author is making the following points (see the last part of the essay):

1. Hackers who write open source software seem to do so where there is no mature market for that software (i.e., they do it for free because no one will pay them to do it, not because they are motivated more by ego gratification than by money, as ESR suggests).

2. Funding by government and academic bodies has significantly contributed to the development of open source software, and to that extent government intervention in the software market (i.e., by directly or indirectly subsidizing the writing of open source software) may be desirable. (Contra ESR?)

3. To the extent that software companies try to co-opt open source developers by hiring them, they undermine themselves by encouraging more people to become open source developers (i.e., so they can get hired).

4. Programmers in countries such as Canada and Scandinavia contribute more per capita to free software than programmers in the USA, perhaps because there isn't a ready market for their skills in their home countries, which suggests that wealthier countries won't necessarily move toward developing more open source software. The breakdown of labor market barriers in a united Europe may therefore affect the rate of development of open source software (i.e., by encouraging those programmers to go where there are jobs rather than stay in grad school hacking kernels or whatever).

5. It might be a useful strategy for some software companies to permit some level of piracy rather than crack down on all piracy and thereby encourage development of open source alternatives.

I think that the open-source phenomenon will quietly, undignifiably, dissapear soon. It is a lofty and noble goal to be sure, however as a sustainable movement, I believe it will become less important over time. Why? Because the high-flying VC money and gold-rush speculation that drove those fat boomtime salaries are what really paid for open-source. The time to code the time to host it, the time to collaborate, just aint there any more during the dot-bomb hangover.

It depends on how you define the term open source. You hint at this in the paragraph that follows.

Open-source is an idea; that will remain. Linux the kernel, and any derivatives; they will remain. Unix is still with us after 30 odd years, and so too will Linux and OSS. Good. But, making money and supplanting a capitalistic machine that is designed for high proiduct turn-over, planned obsolecence, and not giving the customer what they want is the sustainable model, not selling services to free products. If you pay for the product, then you will pay for support. Get a free product, and you find out its not up to par or whatver, why pay for support, just get another free clone....

When you write in the first paragraph that open source will "quietly, undignifiably [sic], dissapear [sic]" but then write in this paragraph that "Linux the kernel, and any derivatives [...] will remain," you are implying that the most important aspect of open source is "making money and supplanting a capitalistic machine." I'm more than a little confused as to how making money could possibly help supplant a capitalistic machine but I'm assuming that you meant something more like "supplanting the capitalistic machine based on proprietary software with one based on open source software." Well, perhaps it is an important element of what many people mean when they use the term open source as a conscious decision to avoid the term free software. In other words, I think that some people who use the term open source, e.g. Eric Raymond, invented the term specifically to describe the socio-economic concept of making money from non-proprietary software. So, what if we talk about free software, i.e. open source software without the libertarian, capitalist spin? Will free software disappear? You yourself even wrote that "Linux the kernel, and any derivatives [...] will remain." Not only Linux but GNU, BSD, et al, will remain for quite a long time. In this sense, how is free software failing? If I want to use software that I am free to copy, modify, and share with the community, I can still do it. Was this not the original aim of the FSF and the GNU project? Larry Wall can still keep providing Perl. I can still look at all of the source code to BSD and W. Richard Steven's TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 2 is as free to publish all the gory details of the BSD implementation of the TCP/IP stack today as it was when he first wrote it. How are any of these things failures for free software?

Personally, I think that free software will continue to flourish in the same way that it has always flourished, e.g. as a free exchange of ideas communicated with source code in the grand tradition of a academic community. Perhaps the views of those who supported the idea, for example, of "Open Source as a Business Strategy" might have try and buttress their arguments in the light of economic realities. Of course, if some of these open source businesses might even manage to survive the current economic downturn and come out strong on the upturn. However, for those who think that one can see "Open Source Software Development as a Special Type of Academic Research", the particular market woes of any .bomb have little, if any, relevance. And what could possible interfere with Larry Wall's idea of open source development as an exercise in "Diligence, Patience, and Humility"?

MS's culture is anti-bureaucratic and developers are been given large amounts of freedom

MS is a company where titles often don't mean as much as credibility, and thus, being blunt is a way to establish dominance. The company is rife with pecking-order gamesmanship, such as not answering e-mail or chronically arriving late to meetings" and in all, politics reign (at software development) in MS. [...] Survival of the fittest is systemic -internecine backstabbing did not evaporate in the presence of great intelligence and wealth, it became more brutal". Insiders argue that Gates himself is responsible for this culture of conflict in two ways: by being arrogant ("Gates is famous for ridiculing someone's idea just to see how he or she defends a position") and by employing the brightest people and inducing them to grow arrogant and assertive

On learning:
Fresh employees do not go through a formal training programme but they learn on the job. [...] MS takes advantage of the knowledge it has accumulated by exploiting emerging mass markets and establishing its products as standards. But at an organisational level, learning is restricted. "Communication frequently suffers as a result of the inner corporate politics and even privileged employees have trouble getting information from inside Microsoft, a reflection of the long-standing schism between the company's marketing staff and its legion of programmers". MS even blocks widespread sharing (of their own source code) within the company (Valloppillil, 1998; Nadeau, 1999a, 1999b, 1999c).

Learning from customers is also limited since there is not effective two-way communication between developers and customers. Lots of people who have used MS' 'help/support services' found it problematic and of limited help.

And on innovation:

Analysts claim that MS finds it difficult to balance being technology-driven with being consumer-driven and this results to great difficulty to move from incremental innovation to truly radical innovation or invention.

After all, MS's competitive strategy is to design products for mass markets and then improve them incrementally by enhancing existing features or adding new ones. Perhaps it this 'incremental evolution' product approach that impedes radical innovation: "The company has a very dramatic focus on its profitable business. I'm not saying that's bad. But it does preclude you from doing any dramatic thinking, doing any dramatic innovation" ... "to the extent that several employees manipulate their inferiors to be given a chance to create something really novel".

There's also a neat diagram of MS's corporate partnerships.

Christopher

(Just karma-whoring today - math assignment prevents me from engaging brain).

MS's culture is anti-bureaucratic and developers are been given large amounts of freedom

MS is a company where titles often don't mean as much as credibility, and thus, being blunt is a way to establish dominance. The company is rife with pecking-order gamesmanship, such as not answering e-mail or chronically arriving late to meetings" and in all, politics reign (at software development) in MS. [...] Survival of the fittest is systemic -internecine backstabbing did not evaporate in the presence of great intelligence and wealth, it became more brutal". Insiders argue that Gates himself is responsible for this culture of conflict in two ways: by being arrogant ("Gates is famous for ridiculing someone's idea just to see how he or she defends a position") and by employing the brightest people and inducing them to grow arrogant and assertive

On learning:
Fresh employees do not go through a formal training programme but they learn on the job. [...] MS takes advantage of the knowledge it has accumulated by exploiting emerging mass markets and establishing its products as standards. But at an organisational level, learning is restricted. "Communication frequently suffers as a result of the inner corporate politics and even privileged employees have trouble getting information from inside Microsoft, a reflection of the long-standing schism between the company's marketing staff and its legion of programmers". MS even blocks widespread sharing (of their own source code) within the company (Valloppillil, 1998; Nadeau, 1999a, 1999b, 1999c).

Learning from customers is also limited since there is not effective two-way communication between developers and customers. Lots of people who have used MS' 'help/support services' found it problematic and of limited help.

And on innovation:

Analysts claim that MS finds it difficult to balance being technology-driven with being consumer-driven and this results to great difficulty to move from incremental innovation to truly radical innovation or invention.

After all, MS's competitive strategy is to design products for mass markets and then improve them incrementally by enhancing existing features or adding new ones. Perhaps it this 'incremental evolution' product approach that impedes radical innovation: "The company has a very dramatic focus on its profitable business. I'm not saying that's bad. But it does preclude you from doing any dramatic thinking, doing any dramatic innovation" ... "to the extent that several employees manipulate their inferiors to be given a chance to create something really novel".

There's also a neat diagram of MS's corporate partnerships.

Christopher

(Just karma-whoring today - math assignment prevents me from engaging brain).

An Internet driven by business, for business, would hardly have the appeal of the net as it exists today. It would be nothing but banners, keywords, affiliate programs, and all the other garbage that already makes the web so annoying.

I agree with your sentiment. In 1994, did people flock to the web (remember that old IBM commercial that had the nun saying she was dying to "surf the web"?) because of advertising and slick corporate marketing materials? Hell NO! The web took off because it was full of crap, truth, lies, gibberish and FAQs that other regular folks put together. CEOs and other pointy-haired morons often forget this reality. The web succeeded because, not in spite of, it's hostility towards business.

This is more than just an opinion by some crank. An AT&T researcher named Andrew Odlyzko has written about this many times. His Content is not king article is the most accessible. Odlyzko has looked at the history of pricing of communications channels, too. More recently, the "Internet Enabled" cell phones have failed, while SMS text messaging phones have taken off, probably because the "Internet Enabled" phone depended on people wanting to view slick corporate marketing collateral, while SMS text messaging is popular because everyone can use it for their own purposes.

I also saw Lessons from Open Source: Intellectual Property and Courseware.

No Joy from P2P vets for Sun's Jxta

By: Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco

Posted: 26/04/2001 at 00:52 GMT

Sun wheeled out its Mount Rushmore of cerebral greats - Gage, Joy, Gosling - to herald the unveiling of its Jxta peer-to-peer project today.

Announced by Bill Joy at the O'Reilly P2P conference in February, Jxta (pronounced "Juxta") is now live and we're awash with positioning papers, technical documentation and real downloadable code. But the instant reaction from the peer-to-peer community - who've been at this for a little while longer - was cool.

"It's no good for FreeNet, next to no use for MojoNation or Gnutella, and no good for SETI at home," FreeNet developer Adam Langely told us. "It is buzzword compliant, though."

And Jxta's reliance on XML brought an "Oh my god," from the developer - a contributor to the excellent O'Reilly P2P book, Disruptive Technologies - who's juggling a rewrite of the FreeNet core in C++ whilst studying for his GCSEs.

It's not as if the guest of honour has marched in to the P2P party, wolfed down the free booze and fondled the hostess. Almost, but not quite.

This party doesn't really need a guest of honour it seems, even if it is Sun itself in best-behaviour mode. Bill Joy modestly described Jxta as a project that attempts to define protocols, that's all. Within a year he told us today, we might have enough usable protocols to embed in some real devices.

But watching these billionaire new frontiersmen earnestly describe the problems that P2P networks need to overcome, after we've watched 18 months of very public sweat and anguish from the Gnutella, FreeNet et al networks as they tackle these problems, strikes as the definition of redundancy.

"These networks develop in vertical silos, and they don't interoperate," said Gage in his introduction today. Which is true: "The P2P projects have nothing in common except TCP/IP", agrees Langely. But far from being their weakness, it's really their strength. Gnutella began life as a brute force, quick-and-dirty mechanism for file sharing, and FreeNet as a long term project to build a secure space free from surveillance. To adopt Sun's Jxta plumbing would not only entail throwing away these hard-won lessons, but it would compromise what each network was created to do. For example, FreeNet is inundated with offers of help to turn it into a platform for instant messaging, a global anonymous email gateway, or the new Napster. Take your pick. But as FreeNet luminary Brandon Wiley unfailingly points out - FreeNet is uniquely useful for dissidents in China (it was inspired by Ross Anderson's Eternity service meme) - so please don't mess it up.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and indeed, well-though-out but pointlessly blue-sky RFCs, and Sun's error is really in mistaking social spaces for technical problems. This conundrum was best illustrated at the O'Reilly conference when a panel moderator (forgive us, we can't remember which one, and we paraphrase liberally here) asked: "Is there a P2P? Is there a P2P business model? Or will it be like client/server? Will we be sitting around at a client/server conference in a year's time?"

So Sun's Jxta is a technology project looking for social uses, and the P2P networks are social projects looking for technology solutions, and the two seem to be passing each other like the proverbial ships in the night.

But let's get some perspective: it's a benign adventure, and doesn't deserve the rancour that say, a Microsoft P2P 'solution' - let your imaginations run riot here, folks - would attract. We've seen so many such pogroms in the past (Pen Windows, anyone?) that trample over not only optimistic start-ups, but entire business models, and with Jxta being the hesitant Apache-licensed venture that is, comparisons don't stand up to scrutiny.

As if P2P had never happened
We'll go into the technical details when we've had time to digest them (comments welcome), but Jxta's a layered set of protocols tackling not just interoperability but monitoring and performance too.

If you were starting from scratch, then Jxta would be an obvious place to go. The monitoring stuff is nice, as plenty of fringe edge networking gets proscribed by vigilant BOFHs, fearful of congestion at network and disk choke-points. And not just BOFHs, either - any local ISP worth its salt should by now have recognised that P2P is a loyalty/community trump card, too.

Interestingly, Joy is thinking small with Jxta. It could be, he suggested, a way of steering users between the mess of access networks that we'll be faced with pretty soon - between 2.5G GPRS/EDGE packet data, 802.11 networks, and our local LAN or dial-up connections. "Devices are too small to carry ten protocol stacks," said Joy optimistically, without quite convincing us that a Jxta-enabled device would solve the problem. But give the man credit, he's looking for an answer to a problem most folk haven't even recognised yet. Unfortunately, the conversation took a turn into the utterly surreal, as Joy began to explain how embedded IP devices in schoolkids' sneakers could cause havoc for teachers, and how Jxta-enabled sneakers would solve the problem, because of their device recovery and monitoring characteristics. Sensibly, and abruptly, Gage drove the conversation back on to dry land before anyone had time to notice.

Let's kill the geeks
But if the distress in the people's P2P community wasn't enough, the opprobrium unleashed on the P2P meme by a lordly tech press is nothing short of astonishing.

"Bill Joy is catching the tail end of a euphoria that never came into existence," declares the New York Times, grandly.

The CNet/ZDNet conglomerate has outsourced its opinion to Gartner Group analysts, who opine:

"Sun was careful to avoid the term P2P, not wanting to be associated with a technology that appears to be going out of fashion." A fashion created by ... analysts such as Daryl Plummer and David Smith as recently as last August, we seem to remember.

Ouch! Since when were the NYT and CNet such pernickety style mongers, we wonder?

Ever since they had the P2P meme foisted upon them, we suspect, and there's more than a hint of snobbishness at attempting to bury an idea that the geek press had the temerity to name before they did. O'Reilly might not have named P2P - we're not absolutely sure who did, and we really couldn't care less - but the meme left the industry elite gasping for air, and without an industry elite to follow, the industry-led tech press was left experiencing a kind of zero-gravity for the first time. The Fourth Estate marches to a well regulated beat. OK, we'll give you 'Open Source' as a rebranding excercise, you can hear them think, but P2P, that's just too much weird shit...

P2P networks, or whatever they'll be called now, are about to be touted as the saviour of Europe's 3G crisis, for the very simple reason that they're communication rather than content based. And while we don't claim to predict the future, that it's a model that's as sane as anything else on the table.

Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip

Online content providers have skipped over a "known good" revenue generation model; that of subscription services. I won't participate as a consumer in micropayment systems. Its too risky. I can't afford to pay $0.05 several hundred, or thousand times a month for content whose value is only known after I've paid. Refund systems layered on top of micropayment just waste my time.

I feel subscriptions are well worth my money. If I find an online resource that has a mandate and reputation for delivering detailed, accurate information with a specific focus, I'd be happy to pay a larger sum of money (larger than a micropayment) under the assumption that they'll continue producing similar information.

For example, I'd probably be willing to pay CA$3/month for access to slashdot discussions. I'd be willing to pay $5 or $10 per month for Access to FirstMonday. I already pay over US$100/year for access to the IEEE Computer Society's Online Library (it's worth every penny!).

I don't bother with "free" information presented by CNN and other "news magazines". The accuracy of the information they present is questionable, and the cover is shallow.

Perhaps if web sites generated revenue from subscriptions instead of banner-ad sales we could be rid of these ridiculous three column layouts that impede understanding of the core content they contain.

Transaction costs lie at the very heart of privacy economics. In the offline world, it's too expensive to express preferences over the use of personal information. You'd have to call up every company you do business with and talk to a customer service rep. That call costs the company like $7-8, and that's too much cost for too little value (if all you're doing is trying to express preferences, check audit trails, etc)

On the Internet, the cost of that transaction plummets to sub-pennies. Per the Coase Theorem, when transaction costs plummet, a corresponding reassignment of property rights is usually required. In this case, the property right over personal information would shift from the company collecting the personal info to the consumer to whom it belongs. This shift in property (privacy) rights would reestablish a "happy" economic equilibrium that got jolted out of place when the Internet (and corresponding massive drops in transaction costs) hit..

So that's why I've always been a fan of the Larry Lessig-style "property rights" over personal information.. I also disagree that you can't assert property rights over info shared w/ a Web site, and then not assert them when talking to a journalist or walking around in public.

I think you can do that (have property rights over Web site info but not over reporters or general public behavior) That's b/c I think you're talking about two entirely different forms of privacy. The journalist, or the form of monitoring that goes on when I'm in public, serve to regulate my behavior.. it's kinda the *government* angle on privacy and its an enforcement of social norms.

On the other hand, when info is shared w/ a Web site, it winds up (often) getting sold on down the value chain where at some point it winds up on some list brokers phone list and I get a call on my cell phone. That call costs me money to answer and reject and if the info was being sold in the first place, I should have gotten a cut of the sale to start with. In this (economic) context of privacy, the assignment of property (privacy) rights to consumers is necessary to reestablish economic equilibrium, per the Coase Theorem..

In 1998, I co-founded a company called PrivacyRight (www.privacyright.com) that is helping deliver on this concept of property rights over personal information.. Check out the Web site sometime..

I've also written papers on the topic of property rights over personal information..

Paul Sholtz
PrivacyRight, Inc. - www.privacyright.com

For example, Kahin sagely points out:

"In-house legal counsel advise against routine reading of issued patents because of the risk of treble damages for willful infringement."

In my opinion, such idiosyncracies in the U.S. Patent system only reinforce the probability of the U.S. government handing out specious monopolies.

I spoke to a former patent examiner a few weeks ago. He informed me that (based on his observations working for the USPTO) patent examiners typically spend about 7-8 hours examining individual patents, plus another 7-8 hours doing "other things." Additionally, he confirmed my suspicion that the USPTO rewards its examiners for approving as many patents as possible -- quantity over quality.

Sincerely,
Vergil
Vergil Bushnell

One is promoting yourself online and then selling CDs, which works out very well, even for the big labels. You don't have to sign with a big label to sell CDs. The other is the Street Performer Protocol, when the artists collect voluntary donations before the music is released, and release it when a certain sum has accumulated.

And, of course, the other methods that you mentioned also seem to work pretty well. Users giving artists voluntary tips does happen. (OK, Stephen King is a bad example. He's already famous.)

--

For alternative views, there's also a couple of papers at:

• Nikolai Bezroukov. Open Source Software Development as a Special Type of Academic Research. First Monday, Vol 4, No. 10 (October 1999), http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue4_10/bezroukov/ index.html
• Nikolai Bezroukov. A Second Look at the Cathedral and Bazaar by Nikolai Bezroukov First Monday, Vol 4, No. 12 (December 1999), http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue4_12/bezroukov/ index.html

For alternative views, there's also a couple of papers at:

• Nikolai Bezroukov. Open Source Software Development as a Special Type of Academic Research. First Monday, Vol 4, No. 10 (October 1999), http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue4_10/bezroukov/ index.html
• Nikolai Bezroukov. A Second Look at the Cathedral and Bazaar by Nikolai Bezroukov First Monday, Vol 4, No. 12 (December 1999), http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue4_12/bezroukov/ index.html

The model of the public sphere was developed by the German Philosopher Jurgen Habermas. It defines strict conditions under which a given forum can be viewed as a Public Sphere. Of possible interest, and relevance to Jon Katz's piece, is that I critique Poster's analysis of the internet (albeit a different essay, The Net as a Public Sphere), arguing that some of what Poster sees as flaws actually enhance the public sphere role of the internet.

Andrew

The model of the public sphere was developed by the German Philosopher Jurgen Habermas. It defines strict conditions under which a given forum can be viewed as a Public Sphere. Of possible interest, and relevance to Jon Katz's piece, is that I critique Poster's analysis of the internet (albeit a different essay, The Net as a Public Sphere), arguing that some of what Poster sees as flaws actually enhance the public sphere role of the internet.

Andrew

So instead, they advocate something like you discussed above, where artists essentially hold their work for ransom until they feel they have been fairly compensated, then release it, and it immediately enters the public domain. While the scheme is not without its problems, it is the most seeminly workable alternative to our present system I have yet to come across.

And HERE is an HTML version if .pdf's annoy you :)

I would like to point out that the Street Performer Protocol was originally produced (at least in this format) by renowned cryptographer Bruce Schneier (he wrote Applied Cryptography and runs the website www.counterpane.com). Here is a link to a paper that Schneier wrote on the subject.

I think the Street Performer Protocol is intersting enough to merit its own discussion thread (separate from the whole Metallica/Napster issue). Would someone a little more "in the know" about this thing put together a summary and submit it to /. please?

Anyone who agrees with this letter or found it interesting might also want to check out the Street Performer Protocol . It was developed by a couple of cryptographers and offers another way for artists to profit off their work in a world totally devoid of copyrights. Basically, they hold their work for ransom until they recieve whatever amount of money they think they can get from whoever wants to donate it. Then, the work is released and immediately becomes public domain. Check it out it's thought provoking.

Anyone who agrees with this letter or found it interesting might also want to check out the Street Performer Protocol . It was developed by a couple of cryptographers and offers another way for artists to profit off their work in a world totally devoid of copyrights. Basically, they hold their work for ransom until they recieve whatever amount of money they think they can get from whoever wants to donate it. Then, the work is released and immediately becomes public domain. Check it out it's thought provoking.

The Street Performer Protocol

The basic idea is that creators hold their works for ransom. Once they get enough money, the work is released and instantly becomes public domain. Read it before you start flaming, it sounds pretty workable to me...

Picture an online movie studio where artists could request money to produce a work they intend to release as freely available online. They post a trailer for free to generate interest, then charge to complete it. The more popular they became the more they could charge. They could also make money on merchandise (ask George Lucas), higher quality offline formats (like DVD, or even film), and offlne presentation (no need to sign away theater rights, and the hype online could make this more lucrative).

Sound Interesting?

Just like to mention that an alternative to copyrights is the Street Performer Protocol by Bruce Schneier. He predicted the advent of systems like this and offers up a partial solution.

I haven't seen anyone really take a stab at setting it up yet though.

Check out the Street Performer Protocol.

John Kelsey and Bruce Schneier have published a proposal on how to deal with exactly this problem. The article is called "The Street Performer Protocol and Digital Copyrights".

And then further down:

"Because so few non-geeks grasped the significance of the Internet early on, government officials, regulators, corporate executives and educators ignored it,..."

First off Jon, you are contradicting yourself here. Make a choice, did academics play a role or not... Well most of us know they did.

To refute that educators ignored that, I'd liked to add that the early net was very instrumental to the science community of academia. Virtually every field of science from astronomy to zoology benefited early on from the capability to communicate either through the newsgroups (mostly run by the academics) or through the early adoption of email. For example, the early newsgroup of NET.columbia began in 1982 shortly after the creation of the newgroup structure (1980?). Of course there were plenty of social ones too: net.games.frp

To address the idea of always be free, many research sites were also affraid of what could/would be written on usenet posts. They would be affraid that certain views expressed their could be used against them by grant making agencies (i.e. government)

A good history available online is:

Netizens: On the history and impact of Usenet and Internet
Michael and Ronda Hauben

This sounds like the Street Performer Protocol that John Kelsey and Bruce Schneier have written about.
--
"But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."

In this way, we take advantage of the medium, instead of fighting it. The artist benefits because free copies maximize his fan base. The public obviously benefits. A new musician or author will have to take some time to build a fan base before making any money, but that's pretty much the case anyway. Given the amount of hype George Lucas can generate, I think this could even work for him.

Seriously Slashdot gives way to much play to ZDNet articles and PCWeek. Why do we so rarely hear about articles from Information Week (sometimes from InfoWorld Electric), Newsbytes, First Monday, or IEEE Journals (hey, now the IEEE has NEWS FOR NERDS!).

Newsbytes is pretty pedestrian but the news is usually raw (uncooked, uninterpreted) and more appropriate for discussion.

This paper provides an overview of the weaknesses of Eric Raymond's (ESR) paper The Cathedral and the Bazaar (CatB) as well as the more coherent demonstration of the fact that the bazaar metaphor is internally contradictive. It is also to a certain extent a reaction to the publication of Eric Raymond's new book The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary (Sebastopol, Calif.: O'Reilly & Associates, 1999). In this paper a more objective picture of the status competition in the OSS environment is provided.

This is really pissy news... All these companys either don't get it or don't want others to get it.. It is not about them anymore, their time is over....

Can we all stand together and say, Fuck'Em.
We have plenty of open source chat/messaging protocols and software pieces without their shoddy contributions...

Just incase you don't know where we are headed (and god am i glad to see someone put all this down in a well stated manner - for i sure couldn't) check this out on first monday, Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright... Damn good reading...

--
Marques Johansson
displague@linuxfan.com