I enjoyed the history and perspective you shared which add to my experience in the computer industry for the last 20 years. To continue the thoughts and questions asked, I'd like to discuss the statement: 'we can build an operating system that is designed from the ground up as "small pieces loosely joined", with an architecture that makes it easy for anyone to participate in building the value of the system'.

When I read this I felt torn between agreement and disagreement. I agree that a new paradigm is built upon much of what currently exists. But like the difference between a Monkey and a Human, both use neurons, but the organization of them differs, or should I say has evolved to produces one organism whose structure is capable of supporting a vast social structure and language far beyond the other. If one looks at computers, operating systems and applications using the architectures of today as the mind set, this previous statement seems false, for it fails to acknowledge that a new system which creates a new paradigm must be a heretofore unique collection of pieces organized in a new ways to form a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

A key reason that this new whole has not been formed yet is that it cannot be owned and possessed by a "Corporation", for the aims and goals of this whole are incompatible with their goals of corporate Ownership, Individuality and Complexity. I'd like to contrast these three concepts with the three concepts promoted in the article: Software as a Commodity, Network enabled Collaboration and Customizability and Software as a Service.

If those in power allow the 'Ownership' of 'Software as a Commodity' to become the property of global humanity collectively, then they would no longer be able to control and extract money from that which has become a public good. This runs counter to their interest and therefore will be discouraged by the architecture of the systems they produce. Because commercial interests have som many people involved in their production, a brain drain occurs and the models of computer use and interaction are simply built upon instead of rethought from ground up periodically. Linux while a great OS, suffers from being Unix architecturally in mind set instead of something far beyond.

There is no benefit to those in power with providing us the means of acting as groups and working to help us break the barriers of our 'Individuality' of use of computers, by facilitating 'Networking enabled Collaboration'. To do so creates a system where the value of what is being produced through the group interaction is the value and not the system itself. Those in power would no longer be able to neither gain profits from the interaction nor own the content of the interaction. So integrated collaborative end user tools, which are 10-100x more difficult to create, are not deemed a priority feature.

Finally, why would a corporation wish to make their system as minimally complex as possible yet very powerful, easily documented and learned and designed to be extended and made 'Customizable and Software as a Service'. To do so would allow others to copy it and facilitate many people evolving it without the original owner gaining further monetary value from those improvements nor maintain control of what is created. Purposeful 'Compexity' is a key defensive strategy used to maintain ownership of most software today. But in reality, most complexity can be a hidden part of a system without burdening users and programmers with it directly. But if the way to use and make applications for a computer became simple, cohesive and symmetric, the applications would be portable to clones of that computer and operating system, and thus ownership would again return to humanity as a global collective.

And so the politics of control and a lack of a cohesive plan for an alternative system, hobbles current computer, network and software architecture. For these are not designed with humanities benefit in mind, they are designed so that a small circle of people can control and own them.

My response continues with a description of the Something(tm) (code name) operating environment project description at:

http://www.shamanicvision.org/simunity/paradigm.html

Thanks,

shannon (at) simmunity (dot) com