[ Thanks to Kelly
McNeill for this link. ]
This one is going up for the simple reason that there’s
something eminently entertaining about recasting the debate between
open source advocates and defenders of proprietary models as a
reiteration of the eternal struggle between all-natural forces of
light vs. a band of evil, rule-changing gnostics:
“Nobody has to pay a fee to God to understand science,
to engage in technology, or to participate in acts of discovery or
invention. There is no license agreement for natural law, and there
is no great cosmic penalty for teaching the laws of nature to
others.”Nature is actually undocumented open-source, which is where the
intrigues begin. As it is largely undocumented, the scientist’s job
is to provide mankind with useful documentation. The engineer’s job
is to take that documentation and use it to build new
“applications” (products) on top of the “code base” (natural law)
that pre-exists. And the educator’s job is to provide open access
to the documentation of both natural and man-made information.”