Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Craig Burton Interview by Doc Searl in LJ
Author: Emmanuel M. Décarie Posted: 7/27/2000; 5:42:47 AM Topic: Craig Burton Interview by Doc Searl in LJ Msg #: 19170 Prev/Next: 19169 / 19171
In the current edition of the Linux Journal (August 2000, you need to be a subscriber to access the web version), there is a very interesting interview of Craig Burton who is saying things that look very close to what Dave is saying on this DG.Here's some excerpts:
If you want to survive in the long run, you need an open-source strategy. But you won't be able to implement one if you collapse a bunch of highly discrete distinctions. (...) Accessibility and ownership. These are very different sets of distinctions, and they are entirely collapsed when most of us talk about them. The opposite of open is closed, not proprietary. The opposite of proprietary is public domain, not open.
Accessibility is an extremely important issue, and it is not just about source code. There are questions of source, binaries, licensing and derivative works. There are questions of protocols and APIs. There are questions of cost. It is important to make distinctions among the variables here. As an industry, we have collapsed the issues of accessibility and ownership.
(...) the culture of Open Source has a strong steak of inhospitality to business. A lot of this comes from the original Free Software movement and persists as a legacy in the GPL license, which is in many ways the least open and business-friendly of all the open-source licenses certified by Eric's organization, the Open Source Initiative. The main reason I point this out is that this anti-commercial bias accounts for the collapsing of distinctions here, because this bias introduces a third axis--a moral one that runs from bad to good. (...) Proprietary and Closed are Bad. Open and Public Domain are Good.
(...) Now it's clear that Open Source is a movement that will eventually include everybody. But that doesn't mean all the code in the world will be open source. Or public domain.
(...) While I think Microsoft could do a lot more--including providing an open-source-based strategy to make Windows accessible--it has made large strides to open up Windows, and we shouldn't ignore that fact for the simple reason that developers and customers have taken advantage of it. Many, many companies have figured out how to make money off of Microsoft's accessibility model.
(...) Both sides [Microsoft and Open Source movement] fail to understand the reasons for the other's successes. We have to get past that, and a good way to start is by getting clear about what some of these distinctions really mean. Without that clarity, we see gray as black or white.
(...) there's this idea that the Net is a finished thing. In fact, it's only beginning. One of its virtues is that it's still wide open. And it would help if more of us understood that openness--the ability of infrastructural software to interoperate without interference from anybody's agenda--is what enables growth.
(...) I see the Net as a world we might see as a bubble. A sphere. It's growing larger and larger, and yet inside, every point in that sphere is visible to every other one. That's the architecture of a sphere. Nothing stands between any two points. That's its virtue: it's empty in the middle. The distance between any two points is functionally zero, and not just because they can see each other, but because nothing interferes with operation between any two points. (...) That's what we're making here: a new world. (...) this thing is in outer space. It's not connected to anything else. If you want to live here, you have to bring your own sustaining structures, foods and the rest of it.
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