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Re: Sunday, August 18, 2002
I agree with pretty much everything Larry says about copyright and its creativity-stifling extensions. I agree about the free & open nature of the Net and I'm with you on the examples you give. I also hate software and business method patents and think IP mania is way the fuck out of control. And I don't need to be sold on the virtues of free and open source software. I've been writing about it as an insider for years. I also believe Larry is doing extremely valuable -- even heroic -- work. But that's not what we've been talking about (or trying to talk about). We've been trying to talk about the software business. Dave believes (and I'm sure he'll correct me if I get this wrong) that Larry doesn't understand the software business itself, in all its real-world complexities. Larry seems most familiar with the venalities of Microsoft and the virtues of the open source community. But there's a heckuva lot more going on out there -- even within Microsoft and the open source communities. Some big and obvious companies, like Microsoft and Adobe, give away as little as they can, try to create industry-sized dependencies on their stuff, and generally don't give a whole lot to the free and open common infrastructure we call the Net. Worse, when some of them die or abandon old code, it isn't given up to the public domain so the rest of us can make use of it. That's a problem. But it's not what characterizes the whole industry. Some sompanies, like Apple, IBM, HPm Sun and Real, now have open source strategies of one kind or another (in the latter case for the first time), now that they see what good can be had from participating in the free & open parts of the industry's ecology. Meanwhile, companies like Dave's have been deeply involved for a long time in the market ecology where commercial software sits on the Net. These companies make constant choices between sharing stuff on one hand (XML-RPC, SOAP, RSS, MacBird) and making money on the other (Manila, RadioUserland). They also know, intimately, that their best work wouldn't get done if they didn't get paid for it, and that hey wouldn't get paid for it if it weren't sold as compiled binaries. My point: in the software businessthere are an endless range of choices, of distinctions, and of many variables, just one of which is closed/open source. Frankly, I've been around that business one way or another for 25 years and I still don't feel comfortable claiming I understand it. But I am clear about what I'm *fighting* here, and that's unnecessary lawmaking and regulating. On that count I find Dave and Larry on the same side. There are responses to this message:
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