zz,xos: Re: Open Source, more yet

[Ted Nelson <ted@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks.  Yes, Open Source is exciting, etc.

>ps i'd help if i could understand zz or osmic or whatever the basic
>concepts are...

Look at my Web pages (addr. below).

It gets a little better every month.

CheerzT


At 05:10 AM 3/26/99 -0500, you wrote:
>On Fri, 26 Mar 1999, Ted Nelson wrote:
>
>> In other words, sure you can sell it-- just as long as
>>  other people are free to give it away!  (Correct me if wrong.)
>
>Yup, well put.
>
>> That's close enough to freebie public domain for my understanding.
>>  In other words, very hard to build a viable business.  Red Hat has--
>>  but not nec the other Linux distributors.
>> 
>> Am I missing something?
>
>Public domain means nobody owns the object in question and you are free to
>do with it as you like, except possibly claim it as your own invention.
>
>Public licence is a contract between a group of developers and users to
>keep all source associated with an idea freely available to all. In other
>words it guarantees that derivitives of public work is also public and
>always shall be. It is a solid foundation to build upon.
>
>A common misconception that you don't have is that you can't make money
>using public work, but there are certainly a few more examples than simply
>Red Hat. 50%+ of the web is currently run on the public Apache web server,
>so you could make an argument that any commercial websites using apache
>have profited. Some of these users write a new feature or squash a few
>bugs in their own interest, and everybody benefits. Netscape drops
>Communicator into the public licence and now Mozilla gets better and they
>don't have to support it. Also happens to increase demand for their
>portal, server, and happens to put a thorn in Internet Explorer. VIA sells
>linux tuned hardware. O`Reilly sells a lot of dead trees. Many small
>development shops can put together business solutions that actually work
>and for a reasonable cost. The synergy is propelling gnu linux towards
>critical mass.
>
>The public licence spans a different sort of economy, it can be hard to
>decide how a given party might profit sometimes. One thing is for sure
>though: The original authors are acknowledged and they generally profit in
>some fashion from the attention, be it new jobs, fat IPOs, research money,
>capital investment, respect, whatever. Presumably if you invent something
>important then you are going to be the highly prized authority on that
>subject, and the law of supply and demand still applies...
>
>You would do well to take a long and hard look at the various public
>licence. If zigzag has real merit and you put it under public licence then
>you stand to interest hundreds (thousands?) of programmers and users and
>to witness the resulting explosion in progress and adoptance. It is pretty
>much your only chance of getting zigzag onto everyone's box and see what a
>couple billion zigzagged minds actually looks like. Unless of course you
>sell it to Microsoft. Soon. But of course that wouldn't really work. 
>
>I can understand the desire for "viable business" as a future goal (I need
>a new computer), but didn't i hear somewhere that the best way to predict
>the future is to invent it? The world is full of patented ideas that made
>a marginal or even generous monetary return, but none of them are going to
>fix the web.
>
>cya,
>
>TiM
>
>ps i'd help if i could understand zz or osmic or whatever the basic
>concepts are...
>
>
>
____________________________________________________
Theodor Holm Nelson, Visiting Professor of Environmental Information
 Keio University, Shonan Fujisawa Campus, Fujisawa, Japan
 Home Fax from USA: 011-81-466-46-7368  (If in Japan, 0466-46-7368)
http://www.sfc.keio.ac.jp/~ted/  (Professorial page)
_____________________________________________________
Permanent: Project Xanadu, 3020 Bridgeway #295, Sausalito CA 94965
 Tel. 415/ 331-4422, fax 415/332-0136  
http://www.xanadu.net (see also Professorial page, above)
PERMANENT E-MAIL: ted@xxxxxxxxxx
_____________________________________________________
QOD 99.03.25
"One event is an anomaly. Two is a coincidence.  Three is a trend."  
-- Anon.