I saw Al Gore speak in DC a couple weeks ago and all I can say is, I hope they get rid of that horrid World Cup theme song as his campaign song.
Gore is a pretty smart guy and I think people will warm up to him once he gets out from Clinton's rapidly diminishing shadow. I disagree with him in quite a few areas, and he is basically too cautious for me in areas I do agree with, but as an actual possibility to be the next president, we could do far worse.
Question to those who despise Al Gore: are you registered to vote? And if so, did you vote in the last election? I do voter files for a living and I can predict that many of you are not registered, and of those who are registered, if you are under 40 years old you probably didn't vote.
If you want someone better than Al Gore to be in office, then you have to participate.
Some may remember the RS article a few years back about Cyborganic. Now, I love the folks who did that dearly (and I was even at a Thursday Night Dinner or two before it all kind of dwindled away), but this gets much more to the reality of what's happening because of the Net and the kinds of social changes in our society it's making.
There's a real story about real people here. Jesse and Eric's story is very familiar; I love living in Portland, Oregon but I moved here by choice as an adult. Growing up here, especially in the inner suburbs, you see a lot of what Caldwell is like, the outcome of 50 years of development ruled by TV, cars, minimalls and crappy construction. The Net may not change all that but at least it offers a new trajectory for those who don't want to be hemmed in.
The high school kids I've talked with in Portland all say how dull it is here. They can't wait to graduate and get away, whether it's to college or not. Then a few years later a lot of them come back, because even the drearier areas of the Northwest offer more real sense of community than the urban east.
The point is that the net offers an opportunity to do things and go places because of who you are, not where you are. That's a big, big thing. And it's not just a big thing for geeks, although the net "takes care of its own" first and foremost:)
As for those comments from AC whiners here, Jon, Jesse and Eric, heed the words of the Ancient Net.Godz:
The mouse button and the D key are your friends. Never forget this.
If there's one thing more annoying about/. than weak jonkatz articles (of which there have been only a few, given the total sum of his input here), it is the tired whining about them.
I'm only saying this once because meta-whining is even more boring.
The problem is that it amounts to social ranking, in other words, rating the poster not the posting. If someone is disliked enough for whatever reason, a small group of moderators can hammer them down so their comments are much less likely to be seen, regardless of the merit of any given posting. Conversely, notable or popular figures can be elevated in visibility.
Thus, we turn slashdot into High School.
I think this is what's behind Bruce Perens' discomfort with this system, since he is a "notable" who's already gotten favorable treatment.
Don't do this, Rob, it's a good idea at one level but with destructive consequences.
--------
And I'm never going back to my old school!" --Steely Dan, pre-ARPANET
Frankly, I'm completely tired of this. Perens and Stallman and Raymond and other self-appointed Spokesmodels for User Software That Doesn't Suck And Is Not Owned By Greedheads have a lot of good things to say when they're not biting each others' ankles.
I'm not sure I understand this comment. The Well never claimed to be the "first" or "best" at anything (like the Grateful Dead who drew in a lot of Well users in the early years, we aren't the best at what we do, we're the only ones who do what we do).
I remember CBBS and I was on a Northwest variant of that here in Portland in early 1984 (it started in about 1979, I think). I used to dial up the Capitol PC Users BBS in DC back then because they had the best collection of PC shareware and utilities. That's how I discovered RBBS, one of the first "bazaar" open source programs (which was to BBS software what Apache is to Web servers). But I digress.
In fact, the Well's roots predate even CBBS, since its early development was substantially influenced by the Community Memory system started by Lee Felstenstein and others in Berkeley and San Francisco in 1973. The history of that is one of the chapters in Steven Levy's book Hackers. Lee has been on the Well since the beginning, by the way.
The Well never developed according to any grand plan, so it's kind of hard to say where things will go from here. But I certainly wouldn't say the history is all behind us now. We keep kicking over rocks and finding interesting new things . . .
I've been on the Well since January 1987, and it changed my life, simple as that. Been a consultant there, still co-host of the News conference and a couple others, including the renowned zipper.ind discussion on all the Clinton hoo-hah over the last year and more.
The Well has always been a place where ideas and opinions get a real airing; it's also a place where people have grudges and get off track and make mistakes. In other words, it's a lively and real "place" that for all its faults is essential to many of its users' lives.
It's also staggered through a rather odd history as an organization, but still has managed to survive. Bruce Katz, the outgoing owner, took an equity position early in the 1990s when a cash infusion was desperately needed. He then took over ownership and had big ideas, unfortunately I'd have to say "pipe dreams," at a time when the net was starting to grow rapidly and the Web was just taking off. I first saw Mosaic on a machine in the Well office in June 1993. It's not like we didn't see what was coming, but adapting to it was a real challenge.
Fortunately, Bruce was smart enough to back off his big plans and just let the Well be what it was best at. In the meantime he tried to rationalize the business structure, merging the struggling proto-ISP part of the Well (oh, that modem rack, you don't even want to know!) with the newly acquired Hooked to create WENET, Whole Earth Networks. At the same time he spun off Well Engaged as a Web-based analogue to the conversation model of the command-line Picospan program (which is still used on the Well).
None of these ventures have exactly been wildly successful. The Well has been more or less stable, though membership has been stagnant. Engaged made some early sales but is hampered by the same problem as every other Web-based discussion system, namely the stateless nature of http. In addition there is a ton of commercial competition in that "space," not to mention things like, uh, Slash. And after Bruce fired David Holub, founder of Hooked and WENET's manager, over David's refusal to knuckle under to UUnet's bullying tactics, WENET kind of floundered and he sold it off to GST, another falling-apart operation (at least he got good money for the sale, though).
Many buyers have sniffed around the Well over the last couple of years, so I'm quite happy that Salon gave the nod. I knew David Talbot in DC two decades ago, and his integrity and smarts show in how Salon has developed and survived. It's too early to say we have a happy ending, but I'm hopeful.
I hope some of you will come by and check out both the Well and Salon, if you're not familiar with them. In their own ways they have the same distinctive character that/. does. (No ACs on the Well, though; no anonymous accounts there though we did try a no-holds-barred anonymous 'conference' once!)
You can get a look at the Well (using the Engaged GUI system) here, this is the inkwell.vue 'conference' or discussion area focusing on book authors.
Before drawing conclusions about the development of open source software from analogies to potlatch society and evolutionary biology, it might be helpful to be more familiar with the actual research sources (in this case, I'd suggest starting with Franz Boas and W. D. Hamilton). Both the original posting and the reply at best superficially refer to the lessons drawn from such research.
The existence of homosexuality and monasteries is not counter to the concepts of kin selection, as research in sociobiology from the mid-1970s, based in good part on Hamilton's kin selection rules and subsequent analysis of r- and K-favoring selection strategies showed.
Likewise, the potlatch economy may have more to do with the growth of repositories of freeware and shareware (think Exec BBS and simtel, to name two early examples) than with the development of such software to begin with.
It's particularly important to know that the "conventional wisdom" about Pacific Northwest potlatch economies is based on a snapshot of Tlingit society about 100 years ago during a period when potlatches themselves were changing dramatically in their character as a result of the influx of manufactured goods and trade systems from newly migrating American settler populations in the region. Boas and others observed Northwest coast tribes during this transition, and only later did research on the nature of potlatch during earlier periods characterized by a quite different and stable arrangement. Here is a good summary.
There are additional layers to the question. For example, here is an interesting paper which has some comments on the relationship between potlatch and the development of class stratification. This brings in another reminder: that economic or cultural phenomena that may have apparently admirable characteristics (the noble and selfless sharing of the potlatch) may also be intimately tied to other less desirable parameters.
By the way, potlatch was suppressed by Canadian authorities from 1884 to 1951 (and thus during the period when all of the "classic" studies were done), although it continued as an "underground" activity throughout that time.
In general, I think it's important to be cautious when borrowing concepts across "kingdoms" and "phyla" of research. Surely the evolution of open source software has a history and a dynamic amenable to analysis from the economic and socio-cultural points of view (and perhaps from sociobiology in a very broad sense), but superficial analysis always runs the risk of misapplying the fundamental findings of any given research area.
Excellent find, memra. Check this from the other report at that same site:
"ICANN is the sole DNS authority with a registrar licensing program, and an approved DNS accreditation policy statement, application and greement. ICANN's policies and agreement include registrar eligibility requirements, contemplate U.S. and World Intellectual Property Organization intellectual property issues, and domain name dispute resolution. Importantly, ICANN requires registrars to disclaim all rights to ownership or exclusive use of certain DNS data elements and to escrow DNS data. This is particularly important to Internet users and domain name holders who have no such protection under the current system. If NSOL desires to continue to be the domain name registry or registrar it will be required to enter into an accreditation agreement with ICANN. Regardless, according to ICANN's registrar accreditation plan, the entire Internet Who-Is database will be safely escrowed and free from any claims by the registry or registrar within no more than 24 months after the testbed is concluded. According to ICANN's established policies, ICANN has the right to terminate the accreditation agreement of any DNS participant who fails to abide by its policies."
Thank you gordoni for injecting some facts into this for the benefit of those who didn't read the original ABC News article and the comments by Clough and ICANN closely.
The whois database pre-exists NSI's involvement by about two decades, back to the early days of ARPANET. I haven't examined all the legal documentation in detail, but it was my understanding that NSI was managing the whois database, and by extension the name registry itself, in trust for the US government that granted it the license.
Instead, they are trying to do something akin to the compilation copyright approach used by West Publishing to appropriate federal and state court cases to its own benefit. Because West's notation and pagination system has been widely adopted by courts in making rules on how lawyers must submit legal citations in their written briefs, West gained a monopoly over the law publishing business and, in fact, spent considerable money in Congress to maintain that monopoly.
This is a bit tangential and I won't get into all the gory details, but it seems like NSI has embarked on a similar campaign to appropriate the domain name system data to its own exclusive proprietary benefit. There can be no other way to read Clough's statement and the response from ICANN.
This may only seem important to intellectual property lawyers and geeks, but since I am of the latter persuasion and once upon a not so very long ago time remember when Jon Postel's crew ran whois, it matters to me. A lot. Especially given NSI's rapidly accelerated bullying and conniving to take advantage of their monopoly position while they provide shitty service.
You want him to go away, but he just stays longer.
You say you can't stand the song he sings, but it runs around your head and you hear it everywhere he goes.
You hated it when he switched from acoustic to electric, but you bought the albums instead of listening to them at your friend's house.
You said he was a jerk, a publicity hound, a copycat, a has-been, a never-was, but he got to perform worldwide.
You applauded when he retired and then begged him to come back in the next breath, but he was never gonna retire anyway.
------
I can't say whether ESR will be *the* troubadour of open source, but what he's done so far reminds me of this:
Come gather 'round people Wherever you roam And admit that the waters Around you have grown And accept it that soon You'll be drenched to the bone. If your time to you Is worth savin' Then you better start swimmin' Or you'll sink like a stone For the times they are a-changin'.
--------
"What about Petreley?" -- bzzzt, try again
on
ESR Wants to Retire
·
· Score: 2
You have *got* to be kidding. I guess it's because I read his columns for years in InfoWorld and I know his schtick. Petreley is an honest guy and not a bandwagon-jumper, but he is prone to over-reaching in search of a grabber headline and frankly, his understanding of the free software/open source world is shallow.
As anyone could tell from his talk at Linux World, I'm afraid to say . . .
This gets to the heart of my problem with Wood's piece. He undercuts some valid points with absolutely atrocious personal attacks, calling CmdtTaco virtually illiterate because of his review of the Open Sources book, without specifying why he would make such a daunting charge (yet the rest of the piece is chock-full of details and references). He then leaps to the notion that the reason Katz is allowed as a feature writer on Slashdot is because of some unstated monetary arrangement and in order to build site traffic in some vaguely unethical way.
Well, give me a fucking break. You want a sleazy money suck, go look at the Lycos deal.
As for Rob, I hope he keeps developing the concept of "feature writers" here on Slashdot. Keeps us from getting too stale arguing about software licensing and whether GNOME or KDE sucks less.
I will know that Rob Malda has sold out when I hear about him driving a new Expedition around the frozen wastes of Michigan, having cashed in on a $100 million deal following a war to the bitter end between Michael Eisner, Bill Gates and Barry Diller for the rights.
What's not clear in many of the news reports is that while NSI's monopoly on domain registration will be ending soon with the selection of the four other domain registrars, they will still run the actual central domain registry itself for quite some time -- I believe their contract runs through late 2000.
This means, in effect, that the other registrars will have to give a cut of their proceeds to their competitor NSI.
NSI has proven to be a marginally competent, arrogant, greedy, empire-building bureaucracy.
Actually, what Al Gore said -- and I heard this in person from the man himself on Saturday -- was that when he mis-stated his involvement in helping get the Internet off the ground, he was really tired from inventing the camcorder the night before.
by the way, Al Gore MUST change his campaign theme music or he's never gonna win. "Go Go Go/Allez Allez Allez!" at top volume. Yeesh.
Well, at least Jon's article saved me the little bit of effort I might have made to open the newest piece of craq from Bill Gates. I just saw his grinning mug on the cover of Time at the news stand and I was wondering what WAS up with that.
Now we know: Bill Gates has written a book-length version of the vapid "how to run your business" columns that PC Week and InfoWorld specialize in.
The Road Ahead, Part II: We don't need to go there with him.
Nonsense. Given that the net was much, much smaller than it is now, Internic registration pre-NSI (yes, kiddeez, NSI is *not* the Internic, it is a service they manage under agreement with the US government, but the Internic long predates NSI) was fast and accurate.
And, yes, it was free (in effect, paid for by your tax dollars).
I'm not surprised to see these calls for prior restraint on the part of/. This merely indicates a lack of careful thinking. Putting brain in gear before clicking "Submit" is always a good policy.
Just how many queries do you think the whois servers and NSI registry servers get in an average hour?
If NSI can't handle 10,000 queries in a couple of hours,
THEY SHOULD GET OUT OF THIS BUSINESS.
Not only that, but NSI of *all* companies involved with the net (that includes Microsoft, MCI and all the other 800 lb gorillas out there) deserves scrutiny for how they do business. From the very beginning, I've always felt it was unwise for the US government to hand over a critical function like domain registry to an obscure and basically unaccountable private business, and this just adds to the evidence of why I was right.
As for the impact on sites reported on in/., it's not like this story is about some out of the way site running on a weak ISP with an oversubscribed T1.
Get real.
PS Not a few commenters here might want to brush up on their knowledge of how the net works. Start with the difference between "registry" and "name server."
Well, what do you expect from a site where the preferences page gets stored with a button called
SAVE USER
:)
(Don't forget, Larry Wall is an evangelical Christian. However, the fact that he's a nice guy, a thoughtful and effective project leader for Perl and a bit of a net.philosopher should remind you that evangelicals are quite varied and not all stuck in the Pat-Robertson-theocratic zone.)
One of the tiresome things to listen to in hacker circles is people calling things "socialist" when they really have no idea what socialism means (or the range of meanings that it can have), nor whether the topic under discussion fits the meaning at all.
In fact, the GPL is very property-rights oriented, as anyone who would bother to listen to what RMS says would figure out immediately.
But then, why bother figuring out what RMS is saying, or what socialism is, when you can use other people's uninformed opinions as a crutch.
Slashdot Mirror
Amazing. Actual thoughtful political *thinking*.
See, Slashdotters? It can be done.
I saw Al Gore speak in DC a couple weeks ago and all I can say is, I hope they get rid of that horrid World Cup theme song as his campaign song.
Gore is a pretty smart guy and I think people will warm up to him once he gets out from Clinton's rapidly diminishing shadow. I disagree with him in quite a few areas, and he is basically too cautious for me in areas I do agree with, but as an actual possibility to be the next president, we could do far worse.
Question to those who despise Al Gore: are you registered to vote? And if so, did you vote in the last election? I do voter files for a living and I can predict that many of you are not registered, and of those who are registered, if you are under 40 years old you probably didn't vote.
If you want someone better than Al Gore to be in office, then you have to participate.
-------
Way to go, Jesse, Eric and Jon.
:)
Some may remember the RS article a few years back about Cyborganic. Now, I love the folks who did that dearly (and I was even at a Thursday Night Dinner or two before it all kind of dwindled away), but this gets much more to the reality of what's happening because of the Net and the kinds of social changes in our society it's making.
There's a real story about real people here. Jesse and Eric's story is very familiar; I love living in Portland, Oregon but I moved here by choice as an adult. Growing up here, especially in the inner suburbs, you see a lot of what Caldwell is like, the outcome of 50 years of development ruled by TV, cars, minimalls and crappy construction. The Net may not change all that but at least it offers a new trajectory for those who don't want to be hemmed in.
The high school kids I've talked with in Portland all say how dull it is here. They can't wait to graduate and get away, whether it's to college or not. Then a few years later a lot of them come back, because even the drearier areas of the Northwest offer more real sense of community than the urban east.
The point is that the net offers an opportunity to do things and go places because of who you are, not where you are. That's a big, big thing. And it's not just a big thing for geeks, although the net "takes care of its own" first and foremost
As for those comments from AC whiners here, Jon, Jesse and Eric, heed the words of the Ancient Net.Godz:
Ne illegitimi carborundum.
-------
The mouse button and the D key are your friends.
/. than weak jonkatz articles (of which there have been only a few, given the total sum of his input here), it is the tired whining about them.
Never forget this.
If there's one thing more annoying about
I'm only saying this once because meta-whining is even more boring.
--------
The problem is that it amounts to social ranking, in other words, rating the poster not the posting. If someone is disliked enough for whatever reason, a small group of moderators can hammer them down so their comments are much less likely to be seen, regardless of the merit of any given posting. Conversely, notable or popular figures can be elevated in visibility.
Thus, we turn slashdot into High School.
I think this is what's behind Bruce Perens' discomfort with this system, since he is a "notable" who's already gotten favorable treatment.
Don't do this, Rob, it's a good idea at one level but with destructive consequences.
--------
And I'm never going back to my old school!"
--Steely Dan, pre-ARPANET
Frankly, I'm completely tired of this. Perens and Stallman and Raymond and other self-appointed Spokesmodels for User Software That Doesn't Suck And Is Not Owned By Greedheads have a lot of good things to say when they're not biting each others' ankles.
--------
I'm not sure I understand this comment. The Well never claimed to be the "first" or "best" at anything (like the Grateful Dead who drew in a lot of Well users in the early years, we aren't the best at what we do, we're the only ones who do what we do).
I remember CBBS and I was on a Northwest variant of that here in Portland in early 1984 (it started in about 1979, I think). I used to dial up the Capitol PC Users BBS in DC back then because they had the best collection of PC shareware and utilities. That's how I discovered RBBS, one of the first "bazaar" open source programs (which was to BBS software what Apache is to Web servers). But I digress.
In fact, the Well's roots predate even CBBS, since its early development was substantially influenced by the Community Memory system started by Lee Felstenstein and others in Berkeley and San Francisco in 1973. The history of that is one of the chapters in Steven Levy's book Hackers. Lee has been on the Well since the beginning, by the way.
The Well never developed according to any grand plan, so it's kind of hard to say where things will go from here. But I certainly wouldn't say the history is all behind us now. We keep kicking over rocks and finding interesting new things . . .
-------
I've been on the Well since January 1987, and it changed my life, simple as that. Been a consultant there, still co-host of the News conference and a couple others, including the renowned zipper.ind discussion on all the Clinton hoo-hah over the last year and more.
/. does. (No ACs on the Well, though; no anonymous accounts there though we did try a no-holds-barred anonymous 'conference' once!)
The Well has always been a place where ideas and opinions get a real airing; it's also a place where people have grudges and get off track and make mistakes. In other words, it's a lively and real "place" that for all its faults is essential to many of its users' lives.
It's also staggered through a rather odd history as an organization, but still has managed to survive. Bruce Katz, the outgoing owner, took an equity position early in the 1990s when a cash infusion was desperately needed. He then took over ownership and had big ideas, unfortunately I'd have to say "pipe dreams," at a time when the net was starting to grow rapidly and the Web was just taking off. I first saw Mosaic on a machine in the Well office in June 1993. It's not like we didn't see what was coming, but adapting to it was a real challenge.
Fortunately, Bruce was smart enough to back off his big plans and just let the Well be what it was best at. In the meantime he tried to rationalize the business structure, merging the struggling proto-ISP part of the Well (oh, that modem rack, you don't even want to know!) with the newly acquired Hooked to create WENET, Whole Earth Networks. At the same time he spun off Well Engaged as a Web-based analogue to the conversation model of the command-line Picospan program (which is still used on the Well).
None of these ventures have exactly been wildly successful. The Well has been more or less stable, though membership has been stagnant. Engaged made some early sales but is hampered by the same problem as every other Web-based discussion system, namely the stateless nature of http. In addition there is a ton of commercial competition in that "space," not to mention things like, uh, Slash. And after Bruce fired David Holub, founder of Hooked and WENET's manager, over David's refusal to knuckle under to UUnet's bullying tactics, WENET kind of floundered and he sold it off to GST, another falling-apart operation (at least he got good money for the sale, though).
Many buyers have sniffed around the Well over the last couple of years, so I'm quite happy that Salon gave the nod. I knew David Talbot in DC two decades ago, and his integrity and smarts show in how Salon has developed and survived. It's too early to say we have a happy ending, but I'm hopeful.
I hope some of you will come by and check out both the Well and Salon, if you're not familiar with them. In their own ways they have the same distinctive character that
You can get a look at the Well (using the Engaged GUI system) here, this is the inkwell.vue 'conference' or discussion area focusing on book authors.
phred@well.sf.ca.us
-------
Actually Cliff Figallo was Director of the Well (and my boss, since I was a consultant working on the billing system) for about seven years.
His book, "Hosting Web Communities," published by John Wiley, has been out for a few months now.
--------
Before drawing conclusions about the development of open source software from analogies to potlatch society and evolutionary biology, it might be helpful to be more familiar with the actual research sources (in this case, I'd suggest starting with Franz Boas and W. D. Hamilton). Both the original posting and the reply at best superficially refer to the lessons drawn from such research.
The existence of homosexuality and monasteries is not counter to the concepts of kin selection, as research in sociobiology from the mid-1970s, based in good part on Hamilton's kin selection rules and subsequent analysis of r- and K-favoring selection strategies showed.
Likewise, the potlatch economy may have more to do with the growth of repositories of freeware and shareware (think Exec BBS and simtel, to name two early examples) than with the development of such software to begin with.
It's particularly important to know that the "conventional wisdom" about Pacific Northwest potlatch economies is based on a snapshot of Tlingit society about 100 years ago during a period when potlatches themselves were changing dramatically in their character as a result of the influx of manufactured goods and trade systems from newly migrating American settler populations in the region. Boas and others observed Northwest coast tribes during this transition, and only later did research on the nature of potlatch during earlier periods characterized by a quite different and stable arrangement. Here is a good summary.
There are additional layers to the question. For example, here is an interesting paper which has some comments on the relationship between potlatch and the development of class stratification. This brings in another reminder: that economic or cultural phenomena that may have apparently admirable characteristics (the noble and selfless sharing of the potlatch) may also be intimately tied to other less desirable parameters.
By the way, potlatch was suppressed by Canadian authorities from 1884 to 1951 (and thus during the period when all of the "classic" studies were done), although it continued as an "underground" activity throughout that time.
In general, I think it's important to be cautious when borrowing concepts across "kingdoms" and "phyla" of research. Surely the evolution of open source software has a history and a dynamic amenable to analysis from the economic and socio-cultural points of view (and perhaps from sociobiology in a very broad sense), but superficial analysis always runs the risk of misapplying the fundamental findings of any given research area.
------
Excellent find, memra. Check this from the other report at that same site:
"ICANN is the sole DNS authority with a registrar licensing program, and an approved DNS accreditation policy statement, application and greement. ICANN's policies and agreement include registrar eligibility requirements, contemplate U.S. and World Intellectual Property Organization intellectual property issues, and domain name dispute resolution. Importantly, ICANN requires registrars to disclaim all rights to ownership or exclusive use of certain DNS data elements and to escrow DNS data. This is particularly important to Internet users and domain name holders who have no such protection under the current system. If NSOL desires to continue to be the domain name registry or registrar it will be required to enter into an accreditation agreement with ICANN. Regardless, according to ICANN's registrar accreditation
plan, the entire Internet Who-Is database will be safely escrowed and free from any claims by the registry or registrar within no more than 24
months after the testbed is concluded. According to ICANN's established policies, ICANN has the right to terminate the accreditation agreement of any DNS participant who fails to abide by its policies."
-------
Thank you gordoni for injecting some facts into this for the benefit of those who didn't read the original ABC News article and the comments by Clough and ICANN closely.
The whois database pre-exists NSI's involvement by about two decades, back to the early days of ARPANET. I haven't examined all the legal documentation in detail, but it was my understanding that NSI was managing the whois database, and by extension the name registry itself, in trust for the US government that granted it the license.
Instead, they are trying to do something akin to the compilation copyright approach used by West Publishing to appropriate federal and state court cases to its own benefit. Because West's notation and pagination system has been widely adopted by courts in making rules on how lawyers must submit legal citations in their written briefs, West gained a monopoly over the law publishing business and, in fact, spent considerable money in Congress to maintain that monopoly.
This is a bit tangential and I won't get into all the gory details, but it seems like NSI has embarked on a similar campaign to appropriate the domain name system data to its own exclusive proprietary benefit. There can be no other way to read Clough's statement and the response from ICANN.
This may only seem important to intellectual property lawyers and geeks, but since I am of the latter persuasion and once upon a not so very long ago time remember when Jon Postel's crew ran whois, it matters to me. A lot. Especially given NSI's rapidly accelerated bullying and conniving to take advantage of their monopoly position while they provide shitty service.
-------
Best thing EITHER of you have done.
It helps that Futurama "doesn't suck." Neither does "It's Like..."
What happened?? Two good new shows in one week? The Millenium must be nigh . . .
--------
You want him to go away, but he just stays longer.
You say you can't stand the song he sings, but it runs around your head and you hear it everywhere he goes.
You hated it when he switched from acoustic to electric, but you bought the albums instead of listening to them at your friend's house.
You said he was a jerk, a publicity hound, a copycat, a has-been, a never-was, but he got to perform worldwide.
You applauded when he retired and then begged him to come back in the next breath, but he was never gonna retire anyway.
------
I can't say whether ESR will be *the* troubadour of open source, but what he's done so far reminds me of this:
Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.
--------
You have *got* to be kidding. I guess it's because I read his columns for years in InfoWorld and I know his schtick. Petreley is an honest guy and not a bandwagon-jumper, but he is prone to over-reaching in search of a grabber headline and frankly, his understanding of the free software/open source world is shallow.
As anyone could tell from his talk at Linux World, I'm afraid to say . . .
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This gets to the heart of my problem with Wood's piece. He undercuts some valid points with absolutely atrocious personal attacks, calling CmdtTaco virtually illiterate because of his review of the Open Sources book, without specifying why he would make such a daunting charge (yet the rest of the piece is chock-full of details and references). He then leaps to the notion that the reason Katz is allowed as a feature writer on Slashdot is because of some unstated monetary arrangement and in order to build site traffic in some vaguely unethical way.
Well, give me a fucking break. You want a sleazy money suck, go look at the Lycos deal.
As for Rob, I hope he keeps developing the concept of "feature writers" here on Slashdot. Keeps us from getting too stale arguing about software licensing and whether GNOME or KDE sucks less.
I will know that Rob Malda has sold out when I hear about him driving a new Expedition around the frozen wastes of Michigan, having cashed in on a $100 million deal following a war to the bitter end between Michael Eisner, Bill Gates and Barry Diller for the rights.
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What's not clear in many of the news reports is that while NSI's monopoly on domain registration will be ending soon with the selection of the four other domain registrars, they will still run the actual central domain registry itself for quite some time -- I believe their contract runs through late 2000.
This means, in effect, that the other registrars will have to give a cut of their proceeds to their competitor NSI.
NSI has proven to be a marginally competent, arrogant, greedy, empire-building bureaucracy.
Something needs to be done.
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Actually, what Al Gore said -- and I heard this in person from the man himself on Saturday -- was that when he mis-stated his involvement in helping get the Internet off the ground, he was really tired from inventing the camcorder the night before.
by the way, Al Gore MUST change his campaign theme music or he's never gonna win. "Go Go Go/Allez Allez Allez!" at top volume. Yeesh.
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Well, at least Jon's article saved me the little bit of effort I might have made to open the newest piece of craq from Bill Gates. I just saw his grinning mug on the cover of Time at the news stand and I was wondering what WAS up with that.
Now we know: Bill Gates has written a book-length version of the vapid "how to run your business" columns that PC Week and InfoWorld specialize in.
The Road Ahead, Part II: We don't need to go there with him.
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A little fluffy, but not bad.
/./ ) is good enough for me.
/./ ?
Anything that raises the Slashdot Quotient (abbreviation:
What's the
Aggregate Content
-----------------
Annoying Drivel
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Nonsense. Given that the net was much, much smaller than it is now, Internic registration pre-NSI (yes, kiddeez, NSI is *not* the Internic, it is a service they manage under agreement with the US government, but the Internic long predates NSI) was fast and accurate.
And, yes, it was free (in effect, paid for by your tax dollars).
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I'm not surprised to see these calls for prior restraint on the part of /. This merely indicates a lack of careful thinking. Putting brain in gear before clicking "Submit" is always a good policy.
/., it's not like this story is about some out of the way site running on a weak ISP with an oversubscribed T1.
Just how many queries do you think the whois servers and NSI registry servers get in an average hour?
If NSI can't handle 10,000 queries in a couple of hours,
THEY SHOULD GET OUT OF THIS BUSINESS.
Not only that, but NSI of *all* companies involved with the net (that includes Microsoft, MCI and all the other 800 lb gorillas out there) deserves scrutiny for how they do business. From the very beginning, I've always felt it was unwise for the US government to hand over a critical function like domain registry to an obscure and basically unaccountable private business, and this just adds to the evidence of why I was right.
As for the impact on sites reported on in
Get real.
PS Not a few commenters here might want to brush up on their knowledge of how the net works. Start with the difference between "registry" and "name server."
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It's a dirty job, but SOMEBODY has to do it.
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I am *so* looking forward to when thousands of ACs bozofilter JonKatz so that we can have a civilized discussion of what he's writing.
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Well, what do you expect from a site where the preferences page gets stored with a button called
SAVE USER
:)
(Don't forget, Larry Wall is an evangelical Christian. However, the fact that he's a nice guy, a thoughtful and effective project leader for Perl and a bit of a net.philosopher should remind you that evangelicals are quite varied and not all stuck in the Pat-Robertson-theocratic zone.)
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The GPL is not socialist, it is libertarian.
One of the tiresome things to listen to in hacker circles is people calling things "socialist" when they really have no idea what socialism means (or the range of meanings that it can have), nor whether the topic under discussion fits the meaning at all.
In fact, the GPL is very property-rights oriented, as anyone who would bother to listen to what RMS says would figure out immediately.
But then, why bother figuring out what RMS is saying, or what socialism is, when you can use other people's uninformed opinions as a crutch.
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