Obzervationz 27.2.2004

CMF 1.5 Roadmap, Redux

Consolidating this week's flurry of discussion about the shape of a new CMF release.

Eben Moglen @ Harvard (GROKLAW)

Moglen said:

[McBride and Gates] see software as a product. In order to make their quote "business model" close quote work, software must be a thing which is scarce. And out of the scarcity of software there will be a price which can be extracted, which will include an economic rent, from which Mr. McBride has suggested somebody will be enabled to buy a second home.

and later:

We think that software is not a product, because we do not believe in excluding people from it. We think that software is a form of knowledge. The International Business Machines Corporation, the Hewlett Packard Corporation, and a number of other organizations either represented here in body or in spirit this evening have another theory, which is that software in the 21st century is a service, a form of public utility combined with knowledge about how to make best use of the utility, which enables economic growth in peoples' enterprises generally, from which there is a surplus to be used to pay the people who help you produce the surplus, by making the best possible use of the public utility.

Zope straddles Mogen's two "good guy" alternatives (free knowledge and service), and enables the creation of "scarcity"-based products, which is a source of not a little stress in its ecosphere.