>On Behalf Of Chuck Grimes
>
> Now what makes for a strange coincidence is that one of originators of
> the BSD license design was Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems. For a brief
> intro to the controversy (Richard Brandt v. Bill Joy) see:
>
> http://www.upsidetoday.com/texis/mvm/richard_brandt?id=380f44bb0
> In any event from what I gathered of the Rose interview, B.Joy is
> worried about the convergence of genetics, nanotechnology, and
> robotics (did he see Matrix and believe it?)...the
> problem isn't science, knowledge or technology---but the very economic
> system he has manipulated to prosper in: Kapital. That and of course
> the patent and copyright policies and laws he was instrumental in
> creating. (The devil is never who you think he is, eh, Bill?)
At this point, I don't buy an argument that the "open source" folks are on the angelic side of the socialist-capitalist divide, while Bill Joy and Sun are in the pits of exploitation hell. Open source folks have embraced billion-dollar IPOs, collaboration with megacorporations and increasingly (Richard Stallman to the eccentric contrary) an ideology of libertarian anti-government attitudes that frankly make the whole open source model suspect. If open source just evolves as a little free open space that binds together mega-capitalist endeavors through unified standards, it is hardly as radical as its proponents claim.
And, if there is no public economic support for its development, and, as Joy notes, there is no way for innovators to control or make money from their additions, it becomes unclear who will contribute to its development. Or rather, it is easy to suspect that those who contribute will be heavily self-interested actors pushing those "open standards" in directions that benefit their for-profit endeavors tied to its standards.
In the article posted, Eric Raymond upholds the banner of the "right to fork" standards, which is great for techie programmers looking for cool code, but sucks for consumers looking for standards that are compatible across the board. One reason Microsoft dominates is because, however much it sucks, people know that Bill Gates is forcing a wide range of programmers to be compatible together, which makes up for its sucky standard. Since most open source advocates like Raymond think any public regulation to encourage compatible standards violates their "right to fork", they contribute just as much to the capitalist competitive model of production, just in a different business model.
I frankly am more impressed with Bill Joy's history in the 1980s of building Sun Microsystems while working with public authorities like ARPA, the NSF and government contracting authorities to create public standards that help spread compatible UNIX standards and Internet protocols across academic and industry computers. That broke down in the early 90s, but it helped set the stage for the Internet's growth. Of course, it made Sun wealthy as well, but it seemed as public-interested a model, if not more so, than the new open source IPO advocates who spurn a strong public sector involvement far more than Sun did in the 1990s.
If there is going to be a real socialist oriented approach to computer standards, it will need a large component of non-programmers and community activists, since at this point, most of the major programming activists are too enmeshed in the whole range of business deals to be speaking for anything other than their own general "business model", as they often now say.
-- Nathan Newman