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Pub rolling O'Reilly is coming out with a new edition of Eric S. Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar, with lots of updates and revisions. ESR explains here. Why nobody wants a Swiss army phone Nice piece by Kevin Werbach on the "tradeoff between doing things well and doing many things." Bet on nature A conversation has spread from Slashdot to the Cluetrain List, thanks to posts by Kevin Jamieson and Tim Cunningham. What got it going was this item by Geert Lovink at Crythome, which takes issue with Charles Leadbetter, advocate of The Ignorance Economy: What Leadbeater is trying to sell is dreamware, this time not developed by Californian anarcho capitalists but big media business, AOL-TimeWarner style. "The net will prosper when it is no longer the preserve of geeks, and when the speed of connections and size of bandwidth are secondary to the quality of the experience it delivers." How the news and game entertainment industry will reach supremacy while simultaneously pushing the borders of technological know-how remains unclear. In any case, the taming of geekdom is on the agenda of the virtual class -- not anymore the Microsoft case. The paranoia for monopolies has shifted to a diffuse fear for over-development in technological directions without markets.
I don't have time to write much about his stuff right now, but my short take is that Leadbetter is coming from fashion and commerce on this chart Infrastructure has three fundamental characteristics:
This is what's happening with all the companies involved in making infrastructure. Userland is doing it with SOAP and XML-RPC (as is Microsoft). Apple is doing it with Darwin. Caldera is doing it with OpenSLP. VA LInux is doing it with SourceForge. Olliance.com is doing it with Olliance.org. Jabber.com is doing it with Jabber.org. Dresdner Bank and CollabNet are doing it with OpenAdaptor. These companies are all trying to do business and make civilization at the same time — to do what's right for them, and for us — whoever we are, where the first person plural pronoun may represent a market, an industry, a community, or the whole species. Perspective comes from looking at the bottom of the stack: at what changes least. Nature. It's looking up from here that we can start to reconcile Richard Stallman, who hopes everyone will be able to obtain good system software free, just like air, and Dave Winer, who says Ask not what the web can do for you; ask what you can do for the Web. In their own ways, both respect Nature. And both are trying to build infrastructure for all of us. There's a lot to argue about. The free software and open source movements, for example, love to talk about licensing, which is really a set of social contracts that attempt to reconcile ideas about the nature of software with ideas about the nature of business. That's what's happening between culture and infrastructure, at the governance level of the chart. If you want proof of the cultural nature of open source and free software licensing, consider these two facts: Not one of these licenses has ever been tested in a court of law; and Not one business has dared to try. I think that's evidence of civilized behavior by both the hacker and the business communities. I think we're only beginning to discover, right here where we make infrastructure, that what's most human about business is what each of us does for all of us. This is not an easy place for business to go. It's at the heart of the Infrastructure Paradox that Craig talks about. But we're going there, all of us. Including Mr. Leadbetter and the whole of AOL/TimeWarner, whether they help us or not. He's not dead. He's just realligned with nature. Euro Linux distro vendor SuSE calls it quits in the U.S. Here's the official flackage. Here's a story about it. Compare and contrast.
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