At a recent speech to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, Internet legend Paul Vixie laid down the problems of proprietary tech politics.
He blogged the talk at his own site, dubbed Flaming Mountainside.
Most of what he said is probably familiar to you. The traditional business models of music collapse once you can make perfect copies. Microsoft’s Trusted Computer Initiative will force you to pay forever to access your own stuff. The idea of municipally-owned utilities (as in municipal WiFi) is really quite old, and made San Francisco what it is today.
Vixie’s talk illustrated the difficulty those who have built open source have with with implications of what they have done. Simply put, they don’t want to see the implications, because it puts them squarely into public policy. So they warn the rest of us then go their own ways, because they’re geniuses and can find work-arounds.
This is more than unfortunate. But it is typical of those in my generation who have gone into technology. We rely on our own version of West Coast Law, and tend to ignore the fact that others may be bound if East Coast Law decides to bind them.
Since Vixie is known as the "father of BIND" there’s a pun here somewhere.
But what are the implications in what Vixie is saying?
- There should be one West Coast Law for all, and it should give us all the freedom Paul Vixie claims to enjoy.
- Open source, which he relies on to avoid the problems he talks about, is the solution.
- This has political implications.
I wish I could be like Vixie and live in my own little world, venturing
out only once in a while to tell everyone else they are screwing up
before returning to my mountain. But I can’t. I don’t have Vixie’s head
for programming languages — English is the only one I know.
The time has come to help everyone gain the rights Paul Vixie enjoys.
Failure to do so will in time bind Vixie as it is binding the rest of
us.
