The Contradiction of Internet

I find it interesting how Bill Thompson describes the contradiction at the heart of internet in his most recent comment at BBC Tech: "It is a mutual enterprise that relies absolutely on co-operation, but the resulting network supports the harshest and most brutal free market ever created."

I think that was a fair description of internet as a whole. It could not exist without all the joint standards and recommendations (eg. those of W3C), but is used as the playground of many commercial ventures, many of which pay no tribute to this spirit of 'mutualism', as Thompson calls it.

I believe it is this contradiction that causes the collision of open source and free software movements, and commercial software developers like Microsoft. They represent the different aspects of what contemporary internet is all about. The open standards people may have been here first, but today internet belongs to all of us.

All in all, I have to agree with Thompson in his conclusion: both aspects are important. While making certain that important standards continue to be open and free, we must allow internet to function as a free market.

BadVista and Lua

In an intricate series of link-clicking in Wikipedia, I found the campaign Bad Vista by the FSF. As much as I respect what the FSF has achieved, I must say that I'll never join the campaign. This seems like the OS war is degenerating to some kind of calling-names-sandbox-fight. The correct way to promote free software is to show where Linux and GNU software is superior, not to flame on every single security invulnerability of Windows. Further examples on where the campaign goes wrong are quotes like "an affordable and usable system running Vista is perhaps 5 years away", when the only reference is a text by an individual writer's blog with no real facts or research to back is up (other than meaningless calculations based on predictions).

I really like to see good free software prosper, but I doubt this is the way to go.

On a completely different subject, thought I'd pick up a new programming language, so I started reading on Lua. Seems interesting and simple enough for my needs (a scripting language atm). I'm halfway through the Reference manual already.