Read Dave Winer's http://www.scripting.com">Scripting News from yesterday . Dave provides links both to Richard's piece (above) and his own piece that provoked it. "We have different philosophies," he writes. "I'm learning his now and working on mine, and it's true that there are things I don't agree with him on. I'd like to see commercial and open source developers work together more fluidly. He seems to agree. Reading his piece I think we could have an interesting discussion. I think we're on the same side on the important issues, believe it or not. (The big issue is patents, for now.)"
I know both DW and ESR, personally, better than I know RMS (although since RMS kindly wrote to correct me on something recently, I am getting to know him better). But I think I understand all three of them well enough to say that their differences are far less important than their agreements — even if the disagreements are far more interesting.
I believe I see something like conversation happening here between DW and RMS. This is a good thing. Only one thing moves an industry forward significantly, and that's conversation between leaders with common interests also shared by customers. More than anything else, conversation is what will turn the software industry from the medieval province of a few suppliers into a healthy marketplace dominated by nobody and enlarged by everybody's participation.
This isn't a utopian view. It's a practical one. We have a useful model in the construction business from which software constructively borrows so many of its metaphors.
Construction is a multi-trillion dollar industry that is run entirely by its architects, builders, designers, developers, contractors and customers. The same thing will be true of the software industry when its own architects, builders, designers, developers, contractors and customers finish taking control of it away from those who persist in mistaking for property the speechlike qualities of software that RMS has been talking about ever since he started a conversation about it, nearly a generation ago.
You can't name the Microsoft of the construction industry. That's because construction has had about 10,000 years to arrive at a state where we hire professionals based on their work and their reputations, which we can easily evaluate because both are exposed, public and subject to improvement by others. It's not a complicated thing, just an unfamiliar one in the software business.
It will become familiar eventually in any case. It'll just happen a lot faster if we truly listen to each other, and learn something in the process.
