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| Monday, May 14, 2007 |
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Those that can, do. Those that can't, litigate. 
| | I'm at the Internet Identity Workshop, where Microsoft has been, since the workshop's beginning, a constructive and helpful presence. The Microsoft folks who come here have always done their best to encourage and to practice interoperation and have had nothing but respect and a cooperative spirit toward the many open source projects also happening in the identity "space". |
| | So it's sad to read Roger Parloff's Microsoft takes on the free world, and other pieces like it. Sez Roger, Microsoft claims that free software like Linux, which runs a big chunk of corporate America, violates 235 of its patents. It wants royalties from distributors and users. Users like you, maybe. |
| | Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith and licensing chief Horacio Gutierrez sat down with Fortune recently to map out their strategy for getting FOSS users to pay royalties. Revealing the precise figure for the first time, they state that FOSS infringes on no fewer than 235 Microsoft patents. |
| | It's a breathtaking number. (By comparison, for instance, Verizon's (Charts, Fortune 500) patent suit against Vonage (Charts), which now threatens to bankrupt the latter, was based on just seven patents, of which only three were found to be infringing.) "This is not a case of some accidental, unknowing infringement," Gutierrez asserts. "There is an overwhelming number of patents being infringed." |
| | The free world appears to be uncowed by Microsoft's claims. |
| | Exactly. Nor should it be. |
| | As Cory Doctorow puts it, The Microsoft position is this: even if you don't use Windows, you still have to pay them as much money as they would have gotten for selling you a copy of it. |
| | Microsoft's sales failures should not be blamed on the marketplace, which clearly regards infrastructural items such as operating systems and web servers as essentially free, open and natural building materials — akin to trees and rocks. |
| | Whatever the arguments (and those are ones I'd rather have at Linux Journal than here), the fact remains that this is a lame move on Microsoft's part. It's the kind of thing you'd expect from a SCO or a Unisys, not from a market leader. |
| | If Microsoft were as smart at the top as it is around here, it would engage the free and open source world. It would build on top of it, rather than fight it. Alas, it has given its customers a much bigger reason not to buy Microsoft stuff than not to use free and open source stuff. |
The evelopes please...
Why I keep blogging
| | Blogging ain't what it used to be. Of course, that has always been the case, and always will be. But for me the main difference is in the ratio of signal to noise — signal being constructive engagement, and noise being celebrity-obsessed churn and stories for their own sake. In some respects this follows the downward arc of People magazine, which began as a journal focused generally on interesting human beings and grew to become a $1.5 billion spearhead for the celebrity industry. |
| | Much of this is harmless. But some is truly harmful. What happened to Kathy Sierra and her much-loved blog (which has now been idle for more than a month) is one among what I would guess are many tragedies of an absent commons where noise/signal ratios can explode in moments toward the infinite. |
| | About 30 years ago, Northrop Frye noted a striking technological change in scholarly resources, from the "portly... tomes" of his childhood, communicating in their physical stature "gimmense and definitive authority", to the "paperback revolution" of his adulthood, which better matched the speed of scholarship and gave wing to the diversification of publishing. The demotic character and relative impermanence communicated by these paperbacks also implied the undermining of authority I just mentioned, in this case a weakening of the barrier between author and reader. Running in parallel if not cognate with this physically mediated change came theoretical changes in ideas of textuality, for example Mikhail Bakhtin's "dialogic imagination", readerresponse theory and, more recently, in anthropological linguistic studies of context. Meanwhile various parts of computer science have developed congruently, from design of black-boxed, batch-orientated systems of former times to toolkits and implementations of "interaction design". Computing has become literally and figuratively conversational. |
| | My point, and Dr. McCarty's as well, is that there is a larger trend going on here — one which works "by making the individual an active co-maker of that which he or she would previously been merely the user". |
| | This isn't just about the demand side getting the power to supply. It's about moving from use to manufacture, from passivity to engagement. McCarty again: |
| | ...it makes less and less sense to be thinking in terms of "end-users" and to be creating knowledge-jukeboxes for them. It makes more and more sense to be designing for "end-makers" and giving them the scholarly equivalent of Tinker Toys. But we must beware not to be taking away with one hand what we have given with the other. To use Clifford Geertz' vivid phrase, we need rigorous "intellectual weed-control"against the Taylorian notions that keep users in their place — notions of knowledge "delivery", scholarly "impact", learning "outcomes" and all the rest of the tiresome cant we are submerged in these days. The whole promise of computing for our time — here is my historical thesis — is directly contrary to the obsolete 19th Century cosmology implicit in such talk. |
| | To find anything that isn't overtly complicit with the Great Technology Sitcom, you have to dig down to the underbelly of the Web. You have to get past the sites with commercial pretensions that are slicing and dicing you, counting the legs and dividing by four, bringing in the sheep. You are being incorporated into their demographic surveys. And, predictably, the lowest common denominator is getting all the juice. You are being packaged for advertisers by some of the hippest hucksters on the planet. |
| | Dig deeper. Down to the sites that never entertained the hope of Buck One. They owe nobody anything. Not advertisers, not VC producers, not you. Put your ear to those tracks and listen to what's coming like a freight train. What you'll hear is the sound of passion unhinged, people who have had it up to here with white-bread culture, hooking up to form the biggest goddam garage band the world has ever seen. |
| | Chris wrote that in the summer of 1999. Even if many bloggers are now entertaining hopes of Buck Two or Buck Two Thousand, blogging is still that garage band. And, at its best, it still rocks. |
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