Those of you who still read dead tree documents may enjoy "Open As
Air" by Lewis Hyde, of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and
Society. Hyde devotes a lot of ink to one of my heros, Benjamin
Franklin, who had a prescient attitude towards open technology.
I've written about Franklin before, see:
http://www.keithl.com/ben_open.html
It turns out, Franklin invented the open source collaborative
method. So this posting actually is on topic, and quite germane
to Daniel Hedlund's talk Thursday night. Lewis excerpts this
last paragraph from Franklin's 1753 letter to Peter Collinson:
...
These thoughts, my dear friend, are many of them crude and hasty;
and if I were merely ambitious of acquiring some reputation in
philosophy, I ought to keep them by me, till corrected and improved
by time and farther experience. But since even short hints and
imperfect experiments in any new branch of science, being
communicated, have often-times a good effect, in exciting the
attention of the ingenious to the subject, and so become the
occasion of more exact disquisition, and more compleat discoveries.
You are at liberty to communicate this paper to whom you please;
it being of more importance that knowledge should increase, than
that your friend should be thought an accurate philosopher.
[ B. Franklin ]
Hmmm ... sounds more like BSD than GPL. Thought you'd like to know.
Keith
--
Keith Lofstrom [email protected] Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs
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