saving the eric
Well, that was a stupid title. I just read an interesting story from blogdex that I loaded on my computer Friday, titled Saving the Net. It raises some very interesting notions about the state of lots of things that revolve around intellectual property, copyright, corporations, conservatives, lawyers and primarily, the internet.
People can cluck about how some people are being alarmists and paranoid and that things are not so dire but I get the feeling that my high school cyberpunk roleplaying games with their talk of mega-corps and that Max Headroom television show from so long ago really have some eerily accurate analogues in our world today.
I do know that everything I do for a living today including the components of the project I’m working on, nearly all of the tools that I’ve used to create the project and nearly all of the technical assistance and learning I’ve employed to accomplish my work has come from the internet. I am entirely dependent and indebted to the open source tools, freely available information, and individual efforts in the form of shared software, knowledge and resources which are made available on the internet thanks to the generosity of others. Those who choose to share have enabled me to survive. That’s a big deal to me and something worth working and fighting to maintain and encourage.
27 July 2003, 22:32 ::
commenting closed for this article