Utopianism has never succeeded as a movement, because there is always at least one predatory member of society who becomes the bad apple.
This policy will never hold, as it allows patent extortionists who are not members to snipe at the W3 with licensing demands. The process for "resolving" disputes is hopelessly optimistic: the group is apparently arrogant enough to believe that the sheer power of the ideals expressed in their policy will discourage profit-seeking behavior, and that the organization will be able to muddle through without any dependencies on externally-invented IP except for that produced by good, like-minded souls who choose to give up their profits for the good of humanity.
The W3 will now have even less clout than it did during its heyday.
(This is cleverly not off-topic, so mod it up NOW!)
Speaking of MS and command lines, one of my favorite essays is In the Beginning was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson. It must be read in the context of this discussion...the CLI is yet another virtualization to threaten the true way...
In the real world, compensating for brain-damaged vendors has a high value to those who must use the products of same vendors!
I'd encourage you to read the "first partition" of the spec, which is not that long. Otherwise, you'll remain ignorant of some cool stuff.
There are definitely new capabilities represented, especially for people who wish to implement compiler features based on extended metadata such as proofs or dynamic re-writing.
The idea that the runtime supports numerous compilers and programming tools is certainly a revisiting of an idea that worked very well in the 70s - this is valuable although it is not new.
This is really not true - the CLI is very different than the JVM from the perspective of compiler and tool builders.
You should check out the ECMA spec for details, but there are a whole lot of differences that will make the world a much better place for people who want a component model rather than just OO fluff.
Is no one else glad to see important structural aspects of our physical world (such as binding legal judgements) start to seep into the virtual world? At least in the US and much of Europe, the framework for society is built with a significant dollop of legal precedent; in order to generate this legal precedent, we need to have judges relating existing laws to frontiers such as hyperlinking practices.
Without this kind of activity, the virtual world will remain the ghetto that it has become in the year following the dotcom crash. With it, the Internet has a chance of becoming the mainstream medium that it deserves to be. I don't expect the courts to get it all right the first time, but I know that they will converge on an acceptable standard over time.
Actually, the duct in the floor is for after the beer, isn't it? A gravity-fed system in the ceiling better seems like the right approach for supplying the stuff...
Wireless is the way to go. In ten years time, there will be enough wireless bandwidth to do all of those things that you think you might want to do...including synchronizing those 47 different multimedia streams that will comprise the infrastructure for SlashSurround(TM).
Lots of griping about 404s, but what do you expect from ad hoc routing software? Webrings, rather than relying upon static links, could (and might) be managed like routing tables, with routes being updated and pushed dynamically, and with redirects to the service upon failure, rather than loss of all reason.
The same could/should be said of 'blogs?? Ted Nelson had a good thing going when he provided for link fixup in his early hypertext fantasies!
Re:Putting commons in context
on
The Future of Ideas
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Unless I really misread you, the thing that breathes life into your innovation commons is government and business subsidy. And the network effect that results from n:n communication makes for efficient diffusion and reworking of ideas, right? I understand and agree with the distinction that you are making, and with your criticism of Hardin.
You ask for a reason to limit what currently exists, and what seems so promising. What about the simplest of all possible reasons, that is to say social cost and stability? I have personally participated in the serendipity that can occur on the net, but I also am very aware of the hidden costs, risks, and the limited capabilities which caused the dotcom implosion. Does society get enough value out of this commons to justify the significant subsidy being provided? This is an open question in my mind; the historical impact of network technologies has seldom been all good, and these technologies have almost always been imposed by the interested parties in the name of social good.
There is a non-trivial cost to providing a fabric for end to end communication and innovation. This cost must be born by either government or the private sector. My own social liberal leanings cause me to agree with your position, but this doesn't mean that our current social obsession with "free markets" won't cause society as a whole to move towards favoring "markets of ideas," at which point the innovation commons may easily become a useless white elephant, while the Hardin fallacy may become the institutionalized norm.
Isn't this happening now?
Convincing corporate overlords to halt what they see as forward motion will be difficult. I am glad to see you trying to do this, but I am also wondering how the new system, should IP law become "harmonized" and protected by measures such as DMCA, will adapt. Do you have opinions here? This is why I am interested in alternatives to a commons-based approach.
(Thanks to lessig for participating in the/. fray today, by the way!)
Don't misunderstand me - I'm all for free culture, as well as free people.
You are proposing the commons as part of a solution, but I am claiming that this may not work due to the structural changes that are taking root in patent/copyright-based society. (In the face of your own good fight, I might add.) A commons may not be the appropriate mechanism to achieve the end that you seek.
One thing that the GPL has taught us is that other kinds of hacks are possible!?
There is a subversive change afoot: many people who had never thought about ideas as things that can be "owned" are starting to think about this issue. Their thinking is being framed by the debate around music sharing, software activation, and other such issues. Most interestingly, many are starting to treat ideas as though they were real property. (OK, summary over...)
The "commons" was originally often found as part of a system in which people were property. At that time, the commons was for the use of those who were bound to the local fiefholder. As more and more autonomy was granted to individuals, this system no longer worked and the commons system morphed into one in which the "owner class" began to seek compensation for the resource in the form of rents or other consideration.
I cannot help but think that Lessig's "intellectual commons" is part of a system in which the ideas that populate them are already bound through other less obvious means to entities such as universities and corporations. The proposition that these ideas be "set free" will lead to exactly the kinds of DCMA shenanigans that Lessig seems to passionately want to avoid??
Is it possible that the concept of an intellectual commons is already becoming an anachronism in the same way that the concept of a common pasture became unusable as the system changed? As our society is driven towards a different notion of property, driven by Disney, RIAA, and other content owners, will fair use of ideas even exist as a tenable mechanism?
Perhaps there will become "free ideas" just as there were "freemen." These ideas would be certified as free, and could be combined with other free ideas... Wait a minute, I've heard this idea before; RMS, where are you when I need an overcharged rant about freedom?
If I'm not mistaken, although guilds certainly came in many forms (and evolved over hundreds of years), most of the time they were about control, mutual protection, and subsidy, rather than property ownership. There are many historical links to be Googled that gloss the concept - I think that you'll find that most support my viewpoint.
I also was not saying anything about the "dissolution of intellectual property." Just like guilds, open source communities are often about control, mutual protection, and subsidy. Hardware vendors and device manufacturers, for example, often underwrite development efforts; businesses have been known to band together around shared interests or cost-sharing; individuals who have an itch wish to share the resulting project with an adoring public; etc. As Lessig says in The Future of Ideas, copyright is not based on the concept of tangible property...instead, it is about tangible control over who can use the copyrighted material. Property was only a secondary factor for guild success (if at all), and creation of source code may turn out to be secondary to ongoing nurture of that source code for my hypothetical "open source guilds."
Most important was (and is) the successful commerce in services that resulted! (Neo-mercantilism must be just around the corner...:)
No, no, what you are missing is that guilds often completely controlled vertical access to the work and its manufacture. They were the only ones with the necessary combination of expertise, resources, and political connections to go from raw resource to fungible commodity.
If...wait, BIG IF...Sterling and Lessig are right about the concentration and fragmentation of power going on right now, then in order to attract new features/projects, the big remaining software powers, lacking all creativity, will eventually be forced to grant monopolies to the most promising software creators. (Just as in the medieval period, guilds were often established as a "recruiting tool" to snarf the foreign experts in some new field.)
It is the combined package of code that works, lore about that code, and restricted access to the CVS tree that is interesting... Without this, I agree with you that serfdom is the unfortunate result.
If we are approaching the age of cyberfeudalism, then cyberguilds (such as Apache, Jakarta, GNOME, and other self-styled independent "meritocratic" organizations) will be significant power holders. Good time to be a code artist, bad time to be a serf.
Taking the medieval analogy to its logical conclusion I have one question: who gets to be the pope? Bill Gates or Richard Stallman?
Open source is not a for-profit venture, but rather a subsidized activity.
Here's a gloss on what Webster (at dict.org) sez about the word "subsidy":
Support, aid, or cooperation; especially extraordinary aid in money rendered to the sovereign or to a friendly power.
A sum of money paid by one sovereign or nation to another to purchase the cooperation or the neutrality of such sovereign or nation in war.
A grant from the government, from a municipal corporation, or the like, to a private person or company to assist the establishment or support of an enterprise deemed advantageous to the public; a subvention, as in a subsidy to the owners of a line of ocean steamships.
Synonyms: Tribute or grant.
Usage: Subsidy, Tribute. A subsidy is voluntary; a tribute is exacted.
Each of these is interesting -- think of corporations as sovereign pseudo-states, and you can imagine many parallels.
One implication might be that source code is becoming a medium of exchange or a currency, rather than a form of speech!!
This is right - much open source activity is effectively a subsidized development model. The companies get more out of collectivizing their software development than they lose by not "owning" the result.
I'm always surprised that more people don't view it in this way...
You've almost hit on the answer. The market for companies is illiquid - it is hard to buy and sell them. Yet someone must have wanted to recoup some of their capital investment.
Invested captital is what Wind River uses to pay the paychecks and fund the revision of the FreeBSD handbook, for example. Because it is hard to find capital right now (it wasn't 2 years ago!) it would be difficult to "just reform" the company.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, you forgot pork-bellies and the Chinese government...
This article was originally posted on Stutz' website. Since OSDir seems to be slashdotted, you can read it here!
Unbalanced emoticons are sometimes correct.
See this thread for reference.
This policy will never hold, as it allows patent extortionists who are not members to snipe at the W3 with licensing demands. The process for "resolving" disputes is hopelessly optimistic: the group is apparently arrogant enough to believe that the sheer power of the ideals expressed in their policy will discourage profit-seeking behavior, and that the organization will be able to muddle through without any dependencies on externally-invented IP except for that produced by good, like-minded souls who choose to give up their profits for the good of humanity.
The W3 will now have even less clout than it did during its heyday.
This is not a *patent* license.
Hmm, perhaps this says more about the quality of the IP than about Chas' relationship with MS?
Just a thought...
Speaking of MS and command lines, one of my favorite essays is In the Beginning was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson. It must be read in the context of this discussion...the CLI is yet another virtualization to threaten the true way...
It is better than that - they use the permutations as well, just to make it extra confusing! CIL is the intermediate language for the CLI...
Linux has a tough road ahead; this is the kind of activity that gives an army like MS the advantage.
In the real world, compensating for brain-damaged vendors has a high value to those who must use the products of same vendors!
I'd encourage you to read the "first partition" of the spec, which is not that long. Otherwise, you'll remain ignorant of some cool stuff.
There are definitely new capabilities represented, especially for people who wish to implement compiler features based on extended metadata such as proofs or dynamic re-writing.
The idea that the runtime supports numerous compilers and programming tools is certainly a revisiting of an idea that worked very well in the 70s - this is valuable although it is not new.
This is really not true - the CLI is very different than the JVM from the perspective of compiler and tool builders.
You should check out the ECMA spec for details, but there are a whole lot of differences that will make the world a much better place for people who want a component model rather than just OO fluff.
Is no one else glad to see important structural aspects of our physical world (such as binding legal judgements) start to seep into the virtual world? At least in the US and much of Europe, the framework for society is built with a significant dollop of legal precedent; in order to generate this legal precedent, we need to have judges relating existing laws to frontiers such as hyperlinking practices.
Without this kind of activity, the virtual world will remain the ghetto that it has become in the year following the dotcom crash. With it, the Internet has a chance of becoming the mainstream medium that it deserves to be. I don't expect the courts to get it all right the first time, but I know that they will converge on an acceptable standard over time.
Wireless is the way to go. In ten years time, there will be enough wireless bandwidth to do all of those things that you think you might want to do...including synchronizing those 47 different multimedia streams that will comprise the infrastructure for SlashSurround(TM).
The same could/should be said of 'blogs?? Ted Nelson had a good thing going when he provided for link fixup in his early hypertext fantasies!
You ask for a reason to limit what currently exists, and what seems so promising. What about the simplest of all possible reasons, that is to say social cost and stability? I have personally participated in the serendipity that can occur on the net, but I also am very aware of the hidden costs, risks, and the limited capabilities which caused the dotcom implosion. Does society get enough value out of this commons to justify the significant subsidy being provided? This is an open question in my mind; the historical impact of network technologies has seldom been all good, and these technologies have almost always been imposed by the interested parties in the name of social good.
There is a non-trivial cost to providing a fabric for end to end communication and innovation. This cost must be born by either government or the private sector. My own social liberal leanings cause me to agree with your position, but this doesn't mean that our current social obsession with "free markets" won't cause society as a whole to move towards favoring "markets of ideas," at which point the innovation commons may easily become a useless white elephant, while the Hardin fallacy may become the institutionalized norm.
Isn't this happening now?
Convincing corporate overlords to halt what they see as forward motion will be difficult. I am glad to see you trying to do this, but I am also wondering how the new system, should IP law become "harmonized" and protected by measures such as DMCA, will adapt. Do you have opinions here? This is why I am interested in alternatives to a commons-based approach.
(Thanks to lessig for participating in the /. fray today, by the way!)
You are proposing the commons as part of a solution, but I am claiming that this may not work due to the structural changes that are taking root in patent/copyright-based society. (In the face of your own good fight, I might add.) A commons may not be the appropriate mechanism to achieve the end that you seek.
One thing that the GPL has taught us is that other kinds of hacks are possible!?
The "commons" was originally often found as part of a system in which people were property. At that time, the commons was for the use of those who were bound to the local fiefholder. As more and more autonomy was granted to individuals, this system no longer worked and the commons system morphed into one in which the "owner class" began to seek compensation for the resource in the form of rents or other consideration.
I cannot help but think that Lessig's "intellectual commons" is part of a system in which the ideas that populate them are already bound through other less obvious means to entities such as universities and corporations. The proposition that these ideas be "set free" will lead to exactly the kinds of DCMA shenanigans that Lessig seems to passionately want to avoid??
Is it possible that the concept of an intellectual commons is already becoming an anachronism in the same way that the concept of a common pasture became unusable as the system changed? As our society is driven towards a different notion of property, driven by Disney, RIAA, and other content owners, will fair use of ideas even exist as a tenable mechanism?
Perhaps there will become "free ideas" just as there were "freemen." These ideas would be certified as free, and could be combined with other free ideas... Wait a minute, I've heard this idea before; RMS, where are you when I need an overcharged rant about freedom?
Yes, they abandoned plans for the parking lot, replacing them with plans for the ultra-lucrative Bronzo-Disney theme park.
I also was not saying anything about the "dissolution of intellectual property." Just like guilds, open source communities are often about control, mutual protection, and subsidy. Hardware vendors and device manufacturers, for example, often underwrite development efforts; businesses have been known to band together around shared interests or cost-sharing; individuals who have an itch wish to share the resulting project with an adoring public; etc. As Lessig says in The Future of Ideas, copyright is not based on the concept of tangible property...instead, it is about tangible control over who can use the copyrighted material. Property was only a secondary factor for guild success (if at all), and creation of source code may turn out to be secondary to ongoing nurture of that source code for my hypothetical "open source guilds."
Most important was (and is) the successful commerce in services that resulted! (Neo-mercantilism must be just around the corner... :)
If...wait, BIG IF...Sterling and Lessig are right about the concentration and fragmentation of power going on right now, then in order to attract new features/projects, the big remaining software powers, lacking all creativity, will eventually be forced to grant monopolies to the most promising software creators. (Just as in the medieval period, guilds were often established as a "recruiting tool" to snarf the foreign experts in some new field.)
It is the combined package of code that works, lore about that code, and restricted access to the CVS tree that is interesting... Without this, I agree with you that serfdom is the unfortunate result.
Taking the medieval analogy to its logical conclusion I have one question: who gets to be the pope? Bill Gates or Richard Stallman?
This is NOT off-topic...
This sounds GREAT! I really, really, hope that you do this; rhinestones are sure great!
Here's a gloss on what Webster (at dict.org) sez about the word "subsidy":
- Support, aid, or cooperation; especially extraordinary aid in money rendered to the sovereign or to a friendly power.
- A sum of money paid by one sovereign or nation to another to purchase the cooperation or the neutrality of such sovereign or nation in war.
- A grant from the government, from a municipal corporation, or the like, to a private person or company to assist the establishment or support of an enterprise deemed advantageous to the public; a subvention, as in a subsidy to the owners of a line of ocean steamships.
Synonyms: Tribute or grant.Usage: Subsidy, Tribute. A subsidy is voluntary; a tribute is exacted.
Each of these is interesting -- think of corporations as sovereign pseudo-states, and you can imagine many parallels.
One implication might be that source code is becoming a medium of exchange or a currency, rather than a form of speech!!
I'm always surprised that more people don't view it in this way...
Invested captital is what Wind River uses to pay the paychecks and fund the revision of the FreeBSD handbook, for example. Because it is hard to find capital right now (it wasn't 2 years ago!) it would be difficult to "just reform" the company.