(soon)
Communicated from Nan Gelhard 12/22/2003 8:50 AM
Good morning,
The protocol for using open source code makes it function like a language: it's adaptable and evolving.
Open source will be as available as English. It's absurd to talk about copyrighting the alphabet. It's absurd to talk about copyrighting the English language. It's reasonable to copyright a work composed in that language.
We've talked about enabling computers to address an irrational environment, and building tools to aid cognition, as glasses aid sight, and scientific calculators aid engineers -- knowledge science.
If we want an alternative to Microsoft in open source code, we need to protect its openness. Ownership needs to be very clear.
No one owns a living language, but the works composed in it belong to their authors.
This is very important both to creative developers and to industry. Software licensing is a tricky business for users and authors. In my company, there is a full-time software license manager. (The position is justified too, imagine the damage a disgruntled employee could do if your software house was not in order.)
Open source code enables interoperability. We've talked here about memes; phrases and stories and ideas and bits of code. In my admittedly limited development experience, code is used and reused. The best programmers think ahead and make their work accessible to the next task. It's in their best interest to use a language that is understood.
As a person interested in scholarly discourse and increasing the sum of human knowledge, open source is particularly charming.
I think it is possible to work in an open environment and create new work, intellectual property that can be protected in the marketplace.
This is a key concept. The key to making computers tools in an irrational, complex world is the proper community based decisions about ownership, and the BCNGroup Charter makes an exciting alternative. Brad Cox’s contribution, superDistribution, seems to round out the solution space nicely.
A Knowledge Toolkit for Developers would make it possible for developers outside the mainstream, true innovators, to work on new technologies that depend on the human in the loop and on a mature understanding of the science of knowledge systems.
Microsoft would like to create a language that it owns and so to control development and limit it to a toolset controlled by Microsoft and its partners.
I have no idea how venture capitalists evaluate endeavors. My experience is limited to evaluating projects in my own work.
I've learned that, though we say they are, projects are not evaluated so much on return vs. risk as they are on the decision makers' familiarity with the people and processes involved in the project.
Nan Gelhard