Open source, freeware and the copyright law of the United States.

or

"James, Ben, Thomas, and Alexander have we failed you?"


Am reading The World is Flat along with 1491 and 1423. It is striking that this round world of ours has gotten so small since the days when I sat in the basement of the Coal Science building at the U of Illinois and talked with Chris and Marc about the code that they were working on for the beta versions of NCSA Mosaic (you may or may not recognize that as the core of the very first web browser family tree NCSA Mosic > Netscape > Mozilla > Firefox).

According to the jumbled mess that I'm reading now, the Chinese knew that the earth was round some hundred years before Columbus and Magellan. They reportedly circumnavigated and explored the earth with four fleets in the years 1421-1423.
Bring that forward a hundred years and we've seen European circumnavigate and the Cortez guys making a mess of the western hemisphere through both good old fashioned manly conquering and the spread of disease which decimated a surprisingly large population.

It took 500 years to make the world small and flat again through the work of folks like Tim Berners-Lee, Mark Andreeson and Linus Torvald. Flat as in flattening the playing field. We are all next door neighbors and the guy who books your cable TV installation or helps you troubleshoot your DVD player or even the person who places your happy meal order might be half way around the world in China or India.


OK so who are James, Tom, Alex and Ben and what do they have to do with some 15th century Chinese guy named Zheng He? In section 8 of the US constitution, James Madison and a gang of young upstarts (including Ben, Alex, and tom) established the powers of the new government to include

To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.

The whole idea of copyright is to promote the progress of science and the useful arts, not to make some music media or machinery mogul rich. Seems to your humble correspondent that we have wandered very far from the source on this one. I rarely hear "happy birthday" sung in public celebrations anymore because someone feels entitled to get rich off the efforts of a 1935 copyright of a lyric that was probably written to make someone happy, not to buy a beemer for the great great grandkids.






Ooops just looked at the time. I have to run off to a meeting of like minds and perhaps storm a bastille (oops again.... wrong revolution). more on this later.



sorry to keep you all waiting. The link in the ramble. The three inventions that made this flattening of our global neighborhood happen were all done in the freeware, open source, non-commercial world. Sure, Marc got a great job after developing Mosaic/Netscape, Tim and Linus likewise did OK. But not by marketing selling licensing and commercially exploiting their inventions. They did it for "the progress of science and the useful arts." If they had been more interested in profiting by the virtual sweat of their brows, and getting their "fair share of the pie" we'd all be a lot worse off.

well more on this later. I guess I'll have to go write a letter to a paper publisher somewhere to see if I can get this writing published somewhere within the next three years so that I can share it with you all..............