I was reminded of the rise of slashdot.org as I read this article. I mean, /. wasn't much when I stumbled upon it ('97 or '98, I guess)... and even today, its value is in its community (well, the cream of that dubious crop, let's say) and the code that supports that community (as they go off to vote for on-line petitions, complain about bad ideas, promote good ideas, etc.) Professor Lessig's Reclaim the Public Domain [petitiononline.com] petition was a great example of its value; Aaron Swartz even plotted the effect [aaronsw.com].

I remember how odd the growing interest in slashcode seemed to me initially... until I thought about it. In that way, I'd argue that the Internet's the driver, since it's the community--and the management problems it brings--that show the true value of the code.

How'd that space get in there? :-/

Corrected hyperlink: Reclaim the Public Domain [petitiononline.com] or

http://www.petitiononline.com/eldred/ petition.html

Does he want the world to be such that if you write a product with an open-source tool, or run a program on an open-source system, that the product has to be open-source itself as well? I'm not even sure you could do the first of these legally, and the second is of dubious value.

He must be seeing failure somewhere else, but I don't see it. Amazon's proprietary code just isn't an indication of the failure of either the Perl or Linux licenses.