🚀 go-pugleaf

It's strange.  I'm getting just old enough to see history repeating
itself.  There is a faction of people on The Net who loathe any sort
of intellectual property.  They think all of the information out there
should be usable by anybody, free of charge.  Witness the FSF/LPF
crowd, and also the vituperation that Ed Vielmetti has suffered now
that he doesn't want to do all the comp.archives work for free
anymore.

All of this reminds me of the Hippie Movement and New Left of the late
1960's.  Their watchword was "Property is a crime!"  And their
arguments were exactly the same:  If we all stopped worrying about who
owned what and just did the productive things were doing *anyway*,
everybody would have more with less work.  Which was quite true.

Unfortunately, it just doesn't work that way in practice.  The Hippie
Movement was financed by remittances from the hippies' parents, and
the world's only experiment in industrial socialism ("the Soviet
bloc") has just collapsed in poverty and despair.  People don't work
unless there is something that they get out of it.  Yes, you can get
volunteer effort (the FSF is a sterling example), but there is a
limit.  Gnu Emacs was written by one person, but it's a "small"
program as programs go.  The only ways to deliver incentives are via a
marketplace or via government grant.  (You can imagine what the result
of leaving it up to the government would be like!)

Up until now, The Net has been like the Hippie Movement.  We get a
great playground, while businesses and the government pay for it.  The
trouble is that The Net is not just a plaything anymore.  If we want
to have it become an "information infrastructure" for the country,
it's got to grow much, much larger than it is now, and it won't be
able to live as a parasite.  It's got to go commercial, and that means
that people are going to have to pay for their usage.

So let's update our prejudices, stop screaming that intellectual
property is a crime, and start building The Net of the future, where
people will provide the really useful services that can't now be done
because they're too difficult to do with volunteer labor.

Dale Worley		Compass, Inc.			worley@compass.com
--
Annual drug deaths: tobacco: 395,000, alcohol: 125,000, 'legal' drugs: 38,000,
illegal drug overdoses: 5,200, marijuana: 0.  Considering government subsidies
of tobacco, just what is our government protecting us from in the drug war?
-- williamt@athena.Eng.Sun.COM