|
Getting past fear and fudding
First, some background:
The mainstream press will cover this as a fight. They can't help it — and in some ways it is. But war and sports metaphors mislead us from the deeper stuff going on here. A few reasons why:
| | 1) The parties involved are not entirely unified or entirely opposed. The free software and open source movements may be on the same side of this argument, but they have plenty of differing opinions about other matters. On the other side, Microsoft hardly represents the whole commercial development "position." There are plenty of other commercial developers (significantly including a pile of companies that identify themselves as open source community members, sell software products and services based on Linux, yet also sell products or services with source code no less closed than most of Microsoft's). Developers like Dave and Userland are right in the middle, working with both Microsoft and the open source community. |
| | 2) We wouldn't be talking about any of this if there were not enormous demands for software originating from both extremes — GPL'd software from the free software movement on one side and aggressively proprietary software from Microsoft on the other — and from all over Craig Burton's matrix. |
| | 3) Watch the drift in the conversations we're having here, in who's talking to whom — and how, and why. The vectors point toward converging interests. This doesn't mean the vectors are anchored in new places; to have persistent value they shouldn't be. But lately I'm seeing more people talking to each other who only used to talk about each other (and not always in the most flattering terms). Why? Because we're all pushing our arguments toward the place where we all need free and open software to build common infrastructure. In other words... |
We're gathering in the marketplace.
| | The real marketplace isn't an economic abstraction. It's the bazaar (thank you ESR) where we all gather to meet, make culture, talk about stuff that matters to us, and do business in the midst of it all. It is the fundamental environment for business. |
| | There are millions of customers and perhaps billions of users in the World Wide Bazaar. Both Microsoft and open source software have functional ubiquity there. Whether they like it or not, they already co-exist and work together (as well as apart) in all kinds of ways. |
| | Bazaars are naturally welcoming places where everybody is in a position to teach and learn stuff they can't get anywhere else. For example, the free software and open source folks get to witness customer demand, while the commercial developers (especially big ones like Microsoft) get to witness the value of goods produced by virtues other than private ownership. And everybody starts to see the shades of gray that surround the conversational black holes that appear whenever we characterize a percieved opponent as evil. |
| | Big industrial companies like Microsoft have trouble seeing the bazaar and what's going on there, because they conceive business in terms of shipping (every company has "content" they "produce," "load" "address," and "drive" toward "consumers" and other "end users"). This is a much deeper and more difficult problem than just conceiving software as a manufactured product — because we all think and speak about business in shipping terms to some degree, often quite legitimately. Business-is-shipping may be the most deeply embedded legacy of the Industrial Age, and for good reason. But now we need other metaphors. The best place to start looking is in the bazaar restored by the Net. |
| | The hackers who grok the bazaar are in a perfect position to teach business folks a few things about what markets were like in the first place, and how they are returning to that state again. (How many hackers work at Microsoft already? Interesting question. We already know IBM had a critical mess of them.) |
The most important arguments aren't about who's stealing intellectual property, or who's fudding whom, but rather about how we build common infrastructure.
| | — which I prefer to call interstructure, because in a literal sense that's what it is. |
| | How do we understand the deeper issues involved here? Very differently, and that's a good thing. |
| | At one extreme the free software movement has a very fixed and developed set of ideas about the public and social nature of software. At the other extreme, as we see from Craig Mundie's speech, Microsoft has fixed and developed ideas about intellectual property and its role in prosperities that arise from proprietary software development and licensing. |
| | Yet in the bazaar we call the Net, the latter operates in the context of the former, because the most infrastructural software has the least influence by ownership. It is literally built to share. |
The interstructure between us all only began to become manifest with the Net and the Web.
| | There are countless services, countless protocols, countless relationships between structural forms of software that are barely conceived, much less built. Instant messaging is a perfect example. Even to the computer industry trade press, which should know better by now, instant messaging is still seen as a grace provided to the world by commercial vendors — AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo — rather than as a fundamental Internet service that should be as easily and freely deployable as Web (e.g. Apache) and mail (e.g. Sendmail) services. Jabber is starting to change that perception, but we still have a long way to go. File, management, directory and security services are even farther away. There's nothing like Apache, Sendmail or Jabber anywhere among them. Yet. |
What we're working on here — together, whether we like it or not — is public stuff.
| | It's not just what Mundie calls an "intellectual commons." It's the world where we all live and work: the world we call civilization. While we're still building it we need to ask the question that used to be Dave's main slogan: Ask not what the Internet can do for you, ask what you can do for the Internet. |
| | This  isn't a question at all for the free software and open source communities. It's a prima facie imperative. But it's the question for Microsoft and every other commercial software developer. This question doesn't occur easily to Microsoft because it's highly concerned about what it owns, and the goods (many of them public) that come from leveraging that ownership. But that ownership has a context, and it's one Microsoft doesn't yet see or understand as well as do the UNIXy morlocks who live and work down at the levels of software civilization that roughly correspond to geology. These are the guys coming at infrastructure (or, with the Internet, interstructure) from the lower layers of the diagram on the right, which I borrowed from The Clock of the Long Now (which describes the speed of change at each of the layers that comprise civilization). |
| | morlocks care deeply about the nature of software (see Stallman), its culture (see Raymond), its governance (see both, starting here and here). So they come at infrastructure from below (where they worked on it for years before it bubbled up like magma and lithified as the Net and the Web). Microsoft comes at the same infrastructure from above — from commerce (and, to a lesser degree, fashion). They know commerce depends on common interstructure. They just mistake pavement for geology. It's a perceptual error. They just don't see what's happening at the deeper levels. They want to make a better world for themselves, their customers, their developers and their shareholders. Which is all fine; but they're paving sand if they don't understand where the lithoshere came from, or how they can contribute to it in a way that supports everybody. |
| | There need to see that there's one core in this new Earth. It doesn't belong to anybody because, in the nature of things, it can't. That's why... |
Microsoft didn't build the Net. Nor did Sun (no, they didn't "put the dot in the dot-com," advertising to the contrary notwithstanding). Nor did IBM. Nor did HP.
| | Cisco certainly helped, but they never owned the Net in any meaningful sense. If they did nobody would have bought it. I've said before that the hackers did it, but that's too simplistic. In fact lots of people built it, and continue to build it, while working for many different employers, including themselves. |
| | The bottom line is, they did it for each other. |
The Net became ubiquitous for fundamentally public, fundamentally social reasons.
| | Nobody owns itEverybody can use itAnybody can improve it |
| | Isn't it fun that these turn out to be really good for business? |
The challenge for Microsoft is to understand and respect those virtues, and to start contributing in a far more conscious way.
| | And the challenge for the rest of us is to help them. |
discuss
Copyright 2010 The Doc Searls Weblog
|
