What strikes me most about this piece (from one of the special periodic editions of the Whole Earth Catalog) is that it absolutely captures one of the consequences of the software / informational-based business models, and pretty much nails that trend in terms of the legal / property / ownership / business-model dynamic.
At the same time, it has a few misses.
The nascent Free Software movement is ignored. I think that’s a general failing of the WEC crowd, which focuses strongly on consumer operating systems and software (CPM, MS DOS, Apple II, and at about this point the just-released Apple Macintosh), but not Unix which was also starting to become available through SCO and a number of other vendors. Eric Raymond seems to have entered the Linux world in large part by publishing his own FAQ for a time on various PC-based Unix options, most with a pretty hefty price-tag.[1] The WEC crowd seems to have largely ignored this at least through 1988. Not that they weren’t aware of it.
Another failure was not grasping the services-based model, though to be fair, that required a vastly more effective, higher-bandwidth, more-reliable networking infrastructure which was still about 15–20 years out. Widespread broadband access only really began around 2003, and wasn’t a principle access mode until another five years later. Arguably there are large parts of the population in the US still lacking adequate high-speed Internet. And of course mobile Internet, which began really 20 years later with the release of the Apple iPhone.
That said, it’s quite prescient and an interesting bit of history. Jay Finney, the author, has a number of other pieces up as well, and I encourage browsing through those.
> Another failure was not grasping the services-based model
They've experienced the first services-based model by the IBM et al. in the 60s and ran away from that by looking into alternative computing. That's where the personal computing came in. Unix was tangential to the problem not until free software (GNU) adopted it as it was the lingua franca of the research community and it seemed to walk a fine line between mainframe corporations and PC tinkerers. For more on this topic look into Fred Turner's book 'From Counterculture to Cyberculture'.
I was referring more to the fact that software sales and licensing (a delightfully dystopian version of which dominates the essay) is the business model that's projected forward.
Instead, we live in something of a bizarro-world of the IBM / EDS / Tymshare model, in which we-the-users don't pay for compute resources, but our eyeballs and manipulativeness is what's sold to advertisers / propagandists.
In a similar way, reading Arthur C. Clarke's descriptions of future digital technology --- his "minisec" from Imperial Earth (1975) foreshadows the iPhone wonderfully --- describes the hardware but not the business and financial model supporting it. The notion that a decades-old hand-me-down device from the protagonist's clone-twin-father would still be useful is also ... charmingly quaint.
Also missing the fact that your hedge clippers would report every fact they could about you and your usage of them and wouldn’t work unless you gave them an address on your Wifi, and you wouldn’t own them, you were just licensing them and if you violate the TOS by waving them at a passerby they’ll stop working.
Well, assuming this isn't an editorial mistake (as others have mentioned), this isn't entirely ironic. It's entirely reasonable to argue that ordinary copyright on creative works is fine, but software copyright goes too far. I tend to agree: software has several qualities that make it a poor fit for the copyright regime, especially with Disney and Germany pushing for longer and longer terms. In fact, it's where I point to when people ask when and why copyright went from an obscure regulation on publishers to an all-encompassing leviathan.
Remember that even RMS/the FSF[0] follows this logic somewhat[1]. The GFDL is quite possibly one of the worst licenses you can choose for Free Software documentation, specifically because Stallman wanted the ability to force GNU-and-Linux distributions to ship FSF political screeds along with their software documentation. It's very restrictive and the few people distributing actually-Free content with it switched to Creative Commons the moment they could[2]. You can license a document under GFDL without Invariant Sections or Cover Texts, but most people just use CC-BY-SA instead.
> Notably, Wikipedia, who had to beg the FSF for a GFDL update to port their content to Creative Commons.
This part of GFDL sums it up:
11. RELICENSING
"Massive Multiauthor Collaboration Site" (or "MMC Site") means any World Wide Web server that publishes copyrightable works and also provides prominent facilities for anybody to edit those works. A public wiki that anybody can edit is an example of such a server. A "Massive Multiauthor Collaboration" (or "MMC") contained in the site means any set of copyrightable works thus published on the MMC site.
"CC-BY-SA" means the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license published by Creative Commons Corporation, a not-for-profit corporation with a principal place of business in San Francisco, California, as well as future copyleft versions of that license published by that same organization.
"Incorporate" means to publish or republish a Document, in whole or in part, as part of another Document.
An MMC is "eligible for relicensing" if it is licensed under this License, and if all works that were first published under this License somewhere other than this MMC, and subsequently incorporated in whole or in part into the MMC, (1) had no cover texts or invariant sections, and (2) were thus incorporated prior to November 1, 2008.
The operator of an MMC Site may republish an MMC contained in the site under CC-BY-SA on the same site at any time before August 1, 2009, provided the MMC is eligible for relicensing.
If software companies ran the government there would be no regulation of any kind. You would think with the complete loss of regulation the government would drastically shrink and become more cost efficient, but on the contrary it would remain just as large.
Perhaps that inefficiency would be partially due to biased hiring. There would be no uniform qualifier for any position or candidate. Everything is an ad hoc decision and literacy is optional. To make those ad hoc decisions feel more informed there could be entire departments devoted to solving this problem with trends and gimmicks.
Perhaps the inefficiency would be due to ineffective education providing candidates with dated skills who write slow bloated products. It doesn’t really matter because employees only need to be minimally efficient to barely qualify their exist and everything else can be contracted out.
When starting a new government initiative, such as building a bridge or defending a country, you don’t need to qualify the expense. Instead you only need to qualify the potential and continuously ask for more money. Hopefully that bridge gets built before the seed money runs out. I guess that’s not much different than the current government and Uber.
Sometimes data is considered when making important decisions, but most often it is ignored in favor of familiar legacy conventions until there is a lawsuit. Fortunately the government would be much better at shielding itself from any kinds of lawsuits or transparency using Section 203 and DMCA as shining examples.
Oh yeah, you're right. If software companies ran the government all cash dispersions would become opaque micro-transactions tied to a vendor completely incompatible with other government services.
That sounds less like an issue with software companies and more like a privatization at scale problem in general.
Gentlemens club contracts to behave as a middleman between the people and government, corporate bucks, rent being deducted from pay… all happened before.
The software part of it is the only novel part to this story.
If we’re going to continue to allow landlords, get used to it. Either you set aside specific time pay them in nation state bucks or they’ll garnish your wages.
How this is seen as any different than forcing a religion on people, I don’t know.
I don’t believe in Bill Gates’ wealth. I’ve never seen him work a day in my life. He’s afforded the social status of a Pope even after his business was convicted of market manipulation.
Yep we’re basically living in the imaginations of others again.
If software companies ran te govenment they wouldn't be software companies any more. Operating under assumptions being the same would be like assuming that if Tsarist Russia never fell but Stalin was in line for the throne he would still be an avowed communist.
There would be so many fundamental differences that the comparison fails to have meaning nor even how the configuration could come to be.
At the same time, it has a few misses.
The nascent Free Software movement is ignored. I think that’s a general failing of the WEC crowd, which focuses strongly on consumer operating systems and software (CPM, MS DOS, Apple II, and at about this point the just-released Apple Macintosh), but not Unix which was also starting to become available through SCO and a number of other vendors. Eric Raymond seems to have entered the Linux world in large part by publishing his own FAQ for a time on various PC-based Unix options, most with a pretty hefty price-tag.[1] The WEC crowd seems to have largely ignored this at least through 1988. Not that they weren’t aware of it.
Another failure was not grasping the services-based model, though to be fair, that required a vastly more effective, higher-bandwidth, more-reliable networking infrastructure which was still about 15–20 years out. Widespread broadband access only really began around 2003, and wasn’t a principle access mode until another five years later. Arguably there are large parts of the population in the US still lacking adequate high-speed Internet. And of course mobile Internet, which began really 20 years later with the release of the Apple iPhone.
That said, it’s quite prescient and an interesting bit of history. Jay Finney, the author, has a number of other pieces up as well, and I encourage browsing through those.
________________________________
Notes:
1. http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/clone-unix-guide.txt