[IP] Remembering the People Who Give Back to the Net, and All of Us
[ I would like to amplify Dan's comments and remember all the people who
contributed to the early days of the net and the IETF -- not because their
companies paid them but because they believed in the vision. They were the
real pioneers and richly deserve credit for what they did. They made a
"contribution to humanity" that is largely unrecognized and unacknowledged.
Dave
Delivered-To: dfarber+@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Sun, 28 Sep 2003 08:59:02 -0700
From: Dan Gillmor <dgillmor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Fyi
To: Dave Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor/archives/001376.shtml
Praising those who give back to the community...
September 28, 2003
<http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor/archives/001376.shtml#001376>Remembering
the People Who Give Back to the Net, and All of Us
? posted by <mailto:dgillmor@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>Dan Gillmor 08:00 AM
?
<http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor/archives/001376.shtml#001376>permanent
link to this item
(Note: This is also my Sunday column in the <http://www.mercurynews.com>San
Jose Mercury News.)
Several weeks ago, a friend, <http://http://hyperorg.com/blogger/>David
Weinberger, and I launched a small, non-commercial Web site. We called it
<http://www.wordpirates.com>``WordPirates'', the purpose of which was to
remind people how some good words in our language have been hijacked by
corporate and political interests.
Because we aren't the only people with ideas along these lines, we opened
the site to allow anyone to add a word plus an explanation of why it should
be there. As we expected, some folks used the system to make off-point,
irrelevant or puerile postings, often with no explanation. We've had to
prune heavily.
But pure malevolence fills some souls, and the Internet is their toxic
playground. One creep found a security flaw in the software powering the
site and exploited it. This person posted programming code inside a comment
form -- some HTML that took users to an unaffiliated Web page containing
one of the most disgusting photographs I've ever seen.
The site came down temporarily but quickly, thanks to users who alerted us.
The offending post has been removed, thanks to a sharp-eyed programmer who
let us know what had happened. The hole is being permanently repaired,
thanks to the free software's developer, who hadn't foreseen this misuse.
We'd surely seen the downside of the Net. But in the response of people who
helped us find, analyze and fix the problem, we'd also seen the profound
upside.
The Internet has become a grossly commercialized Wild West in so many ways.
But the community spirit on which it was founded is alive and well. The Net
depends on the same spirit that motivates volunteers in the physical world:
a commitment to solve problems and make life better for those who might
otherwise not have the resources or expertise.
Some have counteracted predatory moves by companies and governments -- like
white blood cells swarming to protect the body. Others have simply been
builders of common value. All deserve celebration.
One notable recent case involves the Mountain View company that controls
the database containing the ``.com'' Internet domain names. Abusing its
monopoly,
<http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor/archives/http>VeriSign
is taking advantage of people's typos in Web browsers' address boxes. If
you type in a non-existent domain, you get taken to VeriSign's own
advertising-laden page offering alternative Web sites. This act has played
havoc with some of the Internet's fundamental underpinnings, according to
experts, but VeriSign has raised a corporate middle finger in response.
Enter the <http://www.isc.org>Internet Software Consortium, a Redwood City
non-profit that maintains some of the software at the heart of the Net's
basic workings. Asked by many people in the community to find a way to
thwart VeriSign's destabilizing move, Paul Vixie and his colleagues issued
an update to software used by most machines that look up Net domains. This
software ``patch,'' as it's called, helped mitigate the VeriSign damage.
The ISC patch falls into the antibody category. So does the help we
received in fixing the vandalism on our misused-words site.
Builders are more prevalent. One who deserves credit is Brewster Kahle, a
successful entrepreneur who also has done some great community work. The
<http://www.archive.org>Internet Archive's billions of Web pages, many of
which have long disappeared from the live Internet, are a valuable
resource. Now the San Francisco operation is adding digitized audio and
video files as well, encouraging people to use them in a variety of ways
that could enhance our culture.
Another Kahle-led project, the
<http://webdev.archive.org/texts/bookmobile.php>Internet Bookmobile, is a
traveling demonstration of public service. It downloads public-domain books
via a satellite Net link and prints them to order. As the copyright holders
keep bribing Congress to keep extending copyright terms, it's an open
question whether much new material will ever enter the public domain. But
this modern bookmobile shows what's possible when people do things for the
public good.
For every person I could name -- and I could name dozens more -- there are
thousands of others who quietly do their best for the larger community.
They run e-mail lists and maintain software archives, fight viruses and
bugs, and so much more. They maintain an old-fashioned credo of altruism in
an era when the idea of a commons is under attack.
As Weinberger noted in an e-mail to me after our dust-up with the rogue
coder, ``It's as if the Internet is not only self-correcting about matters
of fact but also morally self-correcting: A bad turn is corrected by
several good ones.''
The open source software movement is the canonical example of community
building. Think of it as an ongoing series of virtual barn-raisings
responsible for some of the highest-quality software around, programs that
also prevent proprietary interests from utterly controlling our information
access.
Builders also include amateur Webloggers who take on a subject, usually in
a narrow niche, and provide readers with the latest information on that
topic. Most do it solely because they're passionate about the issue (or
product or whatever), not because of any profit motive. For example, Peter
Suber's <http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html>``Open Access
News'' chronicles an ongoing project to post peer-reviewed scientific and
scholarly literature online without charges or licensing barriers.
The <http://www.isoc.org>Internet Society gives an annual award named after
the late <http://www.isoc.org/postel>Jon Postel. His immeasurable
contributions -- including his creation and even-handed administration of
the early domain-name system -- continue to serve the wider community.
I'd like to see more such recognition of the people who are builders and
problem solvers. They fight on our collective behalf to maintain open
standards and open access. (Please post your recommendations of people who
deserve such honors.)
Vandalism is neither cute nor clever. Greed and centralization will
continue to threaten the Net's core values.
So let's raise a special toast to those who fight the good fight on behalf
of the greater community. They don't get enough credit.
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