John Tennock's Blog

Currently reading Steven Weber's book 'The Success of Open Source'

Weber investigates how and why a system that, by our current conventions shouldn't work, works so spectacularly. His exploration says a lot about new ways to think about ownership, collaboration, intellectual property.

In the chapter 'The Code That Changed The World', this quote:

For international politics, the demonstration of large-scale nonhierarchical cooperation is always important; when it emerges in a leading economic sector that disregards national boundaries, the implications are potentially large. And that is the minimum case. If the open source process is a more generalisable production process that can and will spread, under conditions that I lay out as hypotheses, then the implications will be bigger still.  

We do need some new ways for thinking and this points to some.