Sorry for stealing your whole post, Tim… But its WAY TOO GOOD and short enough to be considered, well… short enough to fit inside a single, quotable, paragraph. :)
ongoing � Credit 2.0™ Where It’s Due
James Governor grumbled at me about repeatedly crediting Hal Stern for the “Web 2.0 = Writeable Web” meme, specifically pointing out Read/Write Web by Rich McManus (which is excellent). He’s got a point, but if we’re going to start down that road, we’ll end up with Tim Berners-Lee, who has repeatedly made it clear that he always thought of the Web as a place to write, not just read. And if we’re going to talk about practice not theory, you’d end up looking at Dave Winer, who pushed RSS in everyone’s face and, more important, proved that a fast-writing ornery geek could gather an audience and wield influence by, you know, doing it. And as a geek myself, I’ve always liked James Snell’s chmod 777 web. Until this minute, I’d thought Hal was the first to nail the 2.0 connection; but now I think that James got there first (May vs. October 2005).
All VERY WELL SAID! Thanks for bringing things into perspective, Tim!
So regarding the blog title…
I LOVE the fact that Tim is poking fun at this whole trademark mumbo-jumbo… because it needs to be poked fun at.
Why?
Because why on earth are we losing site of the fact that it’s okay to protect your ideas from other people who could care less about how much time, effort, and money has gone into your work, and simply are attempting to make money off of something they had nothing to do with?
Open Source Software: Good.
Free Culture: Good.
Give away the farm just because its “feels” like the neighborly thing to do: VERY, VERY, VERY, VERY, VERY…. BAD.
Folks, is there a company on this planet that shines brighter than O’Reilly when it comes to keeping a solid balance of doing what’s right and keeping things profitable?
I doubt it. But if there is, then they need to be commended too.
Is it okay to Trade Mark and Copyright our ideas?
YES!!!!
But don’t take my word for it…. Read what Linus Torvalds has to say on the matter.
Just like those who misunderstood what was taking place in the situation outlined in the above linked story, folks have misunderstood what O’Reilly Media was attempting to do. Did O’Reilly stay within both their legal rights and the moral bounds *they have placed on themselves* throughout the years in which has given them the respect they deserve?
YES!
If you haven’t read Tim O’Reilly’s follow-up piece, please do.
Len Bullard recently followed-up one of my recent posts [1] with a much needed lesson to be learned:
Get used to it.
Get used to what, you ask? Well, get used to this:
The problem, David, is that an accurate history is often at odds with the current pop mythology. There is a long history of people who are important to the technologies that became The Web. But when there is a speeding truck load of money or powerful interests that need things to happen unnoticed, that history is sacrificed.
If you use the PageRank algorithm, you get the ‘designated winners’ just as all pop phenomena eliminates much quality for the ‘new and different’ without regard to it being so. I say again, keep it in mind that the same technology that brought you a world of free information and plunging prices for it took your privacy and is turning the US into a police state. Why? Money. Only money.
So don’t be too surprised if over time some of the mythical heroes are recast as villains, some of the current villains are recast as simpering boobs, and people who’s contributions were small but seminal simply vanish from the story. That is history, a story of many losses for one big moment of progress in which only the moment is remembered and everything else is made irrelevant. When people tell you that the web is unpredictable, they are telling you that their data and their desire are both shallow.
Folks, don’t sell yourself short by living moment-to-moment. There are some *EXTREMELY IMPORTANT* battles being fought right now to ensure that our freedom on the internet will allow us to be just that…
Free.
Not Free as in cost.
Free as in Freedom.
Please don’t lose sight of this, as you will only be giving fuel to the opponents to these bills. The result of providing fuel to these opponents could be disastrous.
Please don’t do that.
Thanks!
—
[1]- Which, it seems, Elliotte Rusty Harold has recently, and inadvertantly, smashed into itzy-bitzy pieces… I disagree with his verdict (and, it seems, he doesn’t realize that IE already has support for this, and has for some time… My guess is that this is the reason they are not a part of the recent surge by Moz, Apple, and Opera) but I’ve learned the hard way not to take Elliotte to task without first thinking about it… For as LONG as necessary as to convince myself not to take him to task, only then to respond if I can’t think of one single reason why its possible I might not be justified in taking him to task…
As such, this is my plan :)
Wish me luck (I’m going to need it, I think… :)
Dave, you have as good a history as the witnesses are willing to record, as good as their memories are and their discipline for being fair from being predjudiced. It isn't simple because there is a Rashomonic effect; all history is subjective in interpretation even if objective in certain facts (say dates and body counts).
The ability to write and preserve a history is a critical quality of any human endeavor. From the dates on tombstones to the hieroglyphs of the Egyptian dynasties, each person has a point of view but the wealthy get to say it louder and longer traditionally. The web is a little different in that many can contribute, but in the time scale of things, will digital memory be more or less permanent? I think less.
Does that mean the memory of the web is trivial? Perhaps. It is certainly easier to game. Yet that has been the case for millenia. The priests did their utmost to destroy the memory of Tutankhamen, but in so doing, also destroyed the memory of the location of his tomb. So by adhering to their rituals for dead Pharoahs and trying to erase his memory, they achieved exactly the opposite.
Games are played and in all games there is an element of chance. Chance favors no prince or pauper. Of such, history is made.
>> The web is a little different in that many can contribute, but in the time scale of things, will digital memory be more or less permanent? I think less. > Games are played and in all games there is an element of chance. Chance favors no prince or pauper. Of such, history is made.
Spend some time considering the difference between a subjective system and an objective system: power. First spend some time on that because it is like XML vs OOP (reuse of data with a minimal contract vs reuse of semantics with a strong contract).
In systems of systems where local and global are in conflict, the global system usually wins but not always. The best model I have for this applies force vectors to the selections that create consensus (why PageRank is easy to game) but it gets a bit hairy to describe that.
The Web 2.0 trademark dustup is an example.
very good,
[1]- Which, it seems, Elliotte Rusty Harold has recently, and inadvertantly, smashed into itzy-bitzy pieces... I disagree with his verdict (and, it seems, he doesn't realize that IE already has support for this, and has for some time... My guess is that this is the reason they are not a part of the recent surge by Moz, Apple, and Opera) but I've learned the hard way not to take Elliotte to task without first thinking about it... For as LONG as necessary as to convince myself not to take him to task, only then to respond if I can't think of one single reason why its possible I might not be justified in taking him to task...
As such, this is my plan :)
Wish me luck (I'm going to need it, I think... :)