The New Fall Line
The New Fall Line
The newly-designed Xanadu Royalty server is strictly for the sale of bytes, for example on the World Wide Web, and does not handle links or transclusion itself. However, it's the minimal component of the Xanadu Business Model. The design has been licensed to Gordon Whiting of Information Farm, Berkeley, a gentleman of energy and integrity.
The Royalty Server is the first part of--
The previous designs have assumed that Xand would be a universal system for managing change and global linkage. But now we live in a much more anarchic world of many clever hackers. This means we have to think in terms of building Xandu out of functioning parts.
THE DIFFERENT FUNCTIONS OF XANADU CAN BE ACCOMPLISHED BY THE DIFFERENT PIECES. But tying them together is a substantial protocol issue.
However, let's not count out the major work done by the guys at XOC. It may yet work, and it's still way at the state of the art.
I have discoverd an obvious and straightforward method for digital micropayment on networks. It is so simple I'm astounded that it's not in current use. I have also worked out an excellent credit method--distributed and libertarian--for global Xanadu-type session payments. i hope to publish these soon.
Xanadu Light is a very simple design. The hard part is the client program you need as a browser. For real transcusion management you need to be able to keep trak of pieces and layers ten times more complicated than the code that Mosaic deals with. Perhaps Tumblers will get used after all.
As always, we expect that others will develop the client programs. (Indeed, that's what happened with World Wide Web.)
The republication sublicense is the heart of our quotation system. But the other contracts of the system are intricate as well, touching on a variety of issues of law and commerce. We can't solve all tehse things, we can just begin.
Andrew Pam and Katherine Phelps, a wonderful liberterian-hacker couple in Melbourne, have been licensed as Xanadu Australia. they are getting funding in Australia for development of the parts of the system.