Reorientation
Reorientation
What to do?
Under the kind leadership of Ann Hardy, a Silicon Valley veteran, XOC worked out a deal for the software to be developed at Memex, Inc., a Palo Alto startup. We would still have the right to use the software for the grand Xanadu publishing scheme.
And I got the name "Xanadu" back.
All was not roses. Bad times worsen personal relationships. NO one feels very good about what happened in the Autodesk thing. But I think we all still agree on the kind of hypermedia world we want.
INTERMISSION
It is often hard to know what to do in life. Sometimes it is extremely hard. 1993 was such a year for me. Dwarfing such mundane concerns as survival, the real question was what should and would become of Xanadu.
In a screen writing course I once took, the class was told that a film has three acts. In act three, the hero has come face to face with fate, and he must chose; and now we find out what he is made of
Act Three seemed about to start.
NIGHT
I found the best working schedule I've ever had, using the dark and quiet of the night to best advantage. Go to bed at ten p.m., get up at three, work in the quiet. Go to bed again at nine a.m., get up at noon, do errands and world-crud by day.
But in the long dark night of the soul I wondered whether to go on with it at all, and what in the world my life could be about without Xanadu.
SOME GOOD SUGGESTIONS
My friend John Levine said to stick with it. Now that people are beginning to understand the copyright problem on the Internet, the simple and elegant Xanadu solution takes on new meaning.
My friend John Larson said to look at Mosaic. I looked at it and thought it was very nice, but much too simple for Xanadu. (I was, however, pleased to see that Mosaic had given a tremendous boost to Tim Berners-Lee's "World Wide Web" distributed hypertext system. Tim is a fine guy and he got the idea from my book Literary Machines.
Others suggested that I consider conventional database as a vehicle for Xanadu. ABSURD! After the brilliant algorithms we figured out? But then I thought more about it.
ORDINARY DATABASE?
I studied conventional database and found out what it WAS. Gosh, how simpleminded. The database people have a funny slant on things. You can see what their concerns were, coming out of punch cards and mainframes, and they only see part of the problem, but after that, HMMM--
I began to see how a Xanadu publishing system could map to conventional database.
Such a comedown! The software we'd been building, the 88.1 and XOC servers, kept track of links and transclusions globally, keeping them bivisible and bifollowable by brilliant technical means. Conventional database had none of that.
BUT, I began to reason, the problem is really how to create a grand open hypertext literature. This meant freedom to publish, freedom to quote, bivisible links (you could see a link from the document liked to) and bifollowable links (you could follow them in either direction). It also meant bivisible and bifollowable transclusion. But how do you do that with conventional database?
THE ECONOMICS OF LINKING
The objective: a world where everyone may quote freely in open network hypertext and hypermedia. But there are really several issues, I realized. Making Xanadu happen is not just a technical issue.
To do Xanadu publishing with database was also an ECONOMIC problem. Meaning that in order to make bivisible links and transclusions feasible, somebody has to pay.
Who pays? Why, the publisher pays to put the stuff on the network, of course, and the user pays to draw it off. But who pays the additional storage costs for the links and the transclusions?
Why the publisher of the links and transclusions. Of course.
And this meant it was really an economic issue: defining a cost structure so the publisher of a link would pay the cost of its being there.
THE END OF THE TUNNEL
The result of these deliberations I call Xanadu Light, and it's a very clean model. Publishers pay for the storage of their own materials, and also for storing the connections they make to others' work.
In other words, if you can't to it technically, do it with economics. A startling idea to me.
A BUSINESS SYSTEM?!
In the course of these deliberations I discovered something very surprising. Xanadu publishing is not a technical system; well, I had always known that, it's a new form of literature. But that had kept me from noticing that Xanadu publishing was a BUSINESS SYSTEM! I had never quite seen it that way.
THE XANADU REPUBLISHING LICENSE
That meant there was another missing part, on the contractual side. If people are going to have the right to quote freely, somebody has to relinquish the right to control them Who is that? The copyright holder. So that free quoting by transclusion, whatever the technical basis, has to be ALLOWED BY CONTRACT. (We can't wait for new laws to get made; we'll just extend them by contractual means.) So I've had to work extensively on designing the license for such pre-permission.
Surprisingly, a lot of lawyers like this proposal. It cuts through a lot of problems: everyone gets paid proportionally to use, everyone gets credit. It's just not in a style customary in the publishing industry.
Nor among the computer hackers. Telling computer guys that they need to have permission to quote things is like having to tell little children about Death. But there well be copyright, and the point is to have that system that gives us all the most freedom.
A DIFFERENT WORLD SYSTEM
So things are starting up again. And Nelson is again in charge of Xanadu, no longer a spokesman, or a knicknack. (And Nelson is much better organized, thanks to Mallicoat.)
REORIENTATION
The arrangements in Japan appear to be most excellent. The people are wonderful. Professor Tanaka is great, and I love being there. Also my whole conception of the Versioning Problem began with Kurosawa's film "Rasho-Mon," which I saw as a boy.
Another big part of it is being appreciated this Prophet-Without-Honor-in-His-Own-Country stuff is precisely true. In Japan my work is much better understood and appreciated, and they understand how different it is from what else is going on.
I look forward to getting Decent Software At Last, beginning with Prof. Tanaka's IntelligentPad, and then what can be done with it. A zippy and clever system of great power, IntelligentPad is perhaps the easiest object-oriented programming system for beginners.
I am grateful, too, for the watchful, thoughtful, and earnest involvement of a firm that wants to be the Japanese strategic partner of the Xanadu enterprise. Their very serious, yet good-humored patience, and the superbly phrased mediations of a translator who did his thesis on Hegel, make this a most interesting serious of negotiations. While we as yet have no formal understanding, our mutual respect and experience with each other continues to grow.
GREAT HELP
As everyone around me knows, none of this would have been possible with out the great and very understanding help of my dear friend and associate Marlene Mallicoat. She has grown to care for Xanadu as I do.
NILENNIUM
I have never been optimistic about the future, and the nastier darkling scenarios grow closer. The government now proposes an Information Snooperhighway. (Orwell said to think of the future as a boot stamping on a human face, forever.) And Heinz von Foerster tells me we are tracking on his 1964 prediction of Standing Room Only by 2016.
But we gotta hope.