The Public Domain

one of the greatest outcomes of the internet in my opinion are the collaborative efforts to grow the public domain. wikipedia, and project gutenberg are two of my favorite resources on the internet. the potential for easy, instant, electronic access to the intellectual goldmine of public domain material around the world is staggering. project gutenberg and wikipedia are heavily biased towards english, but there is a steady and growing community of volunteers working to make both projects into a global resource. the washington post has digitized its archives from 1877 to the present. however, you have to pay to view any of them, even those that long since passed into the public domain. i'm certain, however, that a collaborative effort will develop to make the public domain content of major newspapers around the world available for free online. the web is going to become the largest public library in human history.

linux, the poster child for this whole phenomenon, is available in a dizzying array of languages. multi-lingual support almost always finds its way into popular open source software. i find it likely that most government services around the world will come to rely to a significant degree on open source software for their IT needs. this is certainly not the best news for microsoft. however, for tax-payers around the world, particularly those in third world countries attempting to *develop* a technology infrastructure, free software represents a welcome financial break. for cash-strapped schools in the third world, it is a godsend. obtaining the hardware to provide internet access is difficult enough to come by, much less the cash for commercial software to run on it.

free educational materials and online textbooks are two potential areas for major growth in the open content movement. mit, long committed to the ideal of free software and free content, has begun to make some of its instructional material available for free online. i don't think it will be long before the material is translated and edited for non-English speakers. again, this represents huge potential savings for public education systems around the world, not to mention perpetually cash-strapped college students. i doubt that it will even take a decade for universities to compile 'textbooks' from free educational content on the web, and perhaps even to modify their curricula to take advantage of it. textbooks could be printed by local copy centers and sold to students for the cost of production and distribution. this would translate into several hundreds of dollars in savings every year for a full-time college student if all of his or her textbooks were compiled entirely from open source materials. for elementary and secondary schools that purchase textbooks for their students, the potential savings for the taxpayers who support those schools are enormous.

i think it would also put a very quick end to the gouging of american college students that was exposed recently by a student activist group. foreign editions of textbooks were often half the price of editions sold in the united states. although, i don't pray for an end to capitalism, i believe in a healthy component of socialism in the public sector. it is in a society's best interest to provide a good, cost-effective education to those who want one. open source software and open content textbooks can significantly reduce the costs of education, easing a considerable tax burden.

this is not to say that commercial textbook publishers and software companies are doomed to die a slow and agonizing death. i predict that they will actually draw on the resources of the open source software and open content communities to their own advantage. there is still plenty of money to be made from publishing and selling problems sets and solution manuals to students. professors and teachers will recognize the wisdom of not relying on the same problem sets years after year. commercial software communities can take advantage of open source modules to develop software more quickly and at lower cost. the benefit to the consumer is that companies will have to pass some of those savings on to them as they are forced to increasingly compete with and rely on the open source software community.

i forsee an increasing emphasis on modularity, reusability, and open standards in software development. this is where the open source community can be of most benefit to the commercial software industry. every programmer eventually develops a tool set for common programming tasks. it's a well-known strategy among experienced developers to save time on projects. as the internet's free code library grows, eventually, someone will organize this code into libraries designed to accomplish a set a related tasks. commercial software companies are free to use open source software to develop their own products. they are usually only required to make freely available any changes they make to the open source code. some free software is released under a 'no commercial' use license, but it is dwarfed by source code released under more liberal terms.

the commons does not need to present a threat to the shrewd, inventive capitalist is all i'm saying.