Tim O'Reilly interview - O'Reilly on Java and the Internet (part 2)

By Alun Williams

Posted on 14 Jul 2003 at 15:26

Of course, this event gave me one of my great examples of the power of open standards. While Netscape played the game of proprietary advantage and lost, going from a 90+ per cent share of the browser market down to 5 per cent, Apache, which has hewed to Internet standards (as well as open source) has held and even extended its market share.

But at any rate, I had hopes that I could help turn the Internet Society (ISOC) into something like the Sierra Club or other environmental organizations - groups that were able to make the point that there was a 'commons' at stake, an area that was not owned by any individual company or group, but by all of us collectively. As the organization that provided a legal umbrella to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and Internet standards process, I hoped that ISOC would be able to take the moral high ground and stand up for Internet users as a class. I still think that the environmental movement has a lot to teach the Internet standards and free software communities about how to do effective political grassroots organizing.

Unfortunately, the Internet Society didn't seize the opportunity, and preferred at that time to remain a professional society for Internet developers and administrators. I believe that just recently they have come around to my point of view and are trying to increase their scope, but I believe that they missed the opportunity to gain massive membership in the early days of the Internet craze, a membership that would have given them a kind of clout that now belongs to large companies.

The EFF (www.eff.org) focuses more on civil liberties issues, of which there are also many. I remain a supporter of the group, but am no longer on the board. These non-profit boards take a lot of time, and I have found it more productive to do my own freelance activism in many cases.

Another related organization that I've been active in supporting is Larry Lessig's Creative Commons (www.creativecommons.org), an organization that is focused more broadly on making sure that we have a robust public domain, and that copyright and other forms of 'intellectual property protection' don't limit the free exchange of ideas, and the game of 'leapfrog' that most creative innovations depend on.

Tim O'Reilly interview - O'Reilly on Linux (part 1)
Tim O'Reilly interview - O'Reilly on Java and the Internet (part 2)
Tim O'Reilly interview - O'Reilly on books (part 3)