I was working on a task for Dave Wiley’s IPT 692R course which asked me to summarize the history of the open education movement. I had begun by reflecting on the history of the internet, particularly the aspects of conflict between creators, consumers, and copyright holders. This, I figured, would help me lay out in my own mind a context for considering both the history and the future of open education. With a little tongue-in-cheek mirth and zeal for the future of openness, I typed out the following take on the history of the Internet(I’ll be posting my actual assignment later). I welcome you to correct my timeline, as much of which I pieced together from my own memory.
A Brief History of the Internet,Part 1
Internet Map. by Matt Britt, Wikicommons
In the beginning was cyberspace, a dark, unknown void, whose depth and breadth were untested. Beyond this void were multitudes of isolated instances of archived information, crudely organized, but primitively connected, narrowly accessible, and not easily reproduced.
Then the Internet was born, and soon would come days when baud modems populated the lands. And the internet begat baud modems, which begat dial-up servers, which eventually begat BBS servers for trading song lyrics and shareware, and FTP servers for sharing text files and games. Thus the sharing and consuming of niche information multiplied throughout many lands.
From amongst these early adopters were born the elite nerds, and many rejoicing in the magic of the networks let their hearts harden against Copyright, which was the law. There were many who read the works of the Three Philosophers, Asimov and Dick and Gibson, and fashioned themselves as cyberpunks. And there were many who beheld visions of shareware, and the coming of open source. Ten, seeing how the people who were not 1337 suffered, soon the elite nerds opened the gates of the Internet to the masses of the world, and with Mosaic and Navigator ushered them into the wilderness.
The masses found and consumed the information, and it was good. And the masses authored, and created, and it was better. Yea, even through the beneficence of ad-riddled sites such as Geocities the peoples’ voices grew. Creators shared the information that they had with consumers, and consumers often shared it as well, whether the creators liked it or not, for all was public. And some who would not share did so anyway, for they were ignorant, and had no Google Analytics to track visitor data.
Then one day the tempter, a two-headed serpent, came and whispered in the ear of the creators, “If it’s publicly available on the web, how will you make any money?”
So the creators saw that they were naked, and sewed themselves footers with character entities such as ©, and limited their software to 30-day demos. And the works of many creators were hidden, or else ignored, and throughout the land many foul things were uttered against creators.
With his second head the tempter whispered to the consumers, “Why should you pay for that song if you can get it for free?” Thus the consumers were emboldened, and made Hotline, and Napster. And throughout the land their actions were labeled a sin against the creators.
Thus the tempter sowed enmity between creators and consumers, and enlarged their feud by running sensational TV reports on the local news.
There were in this land, living amongst the creators and consumers, philosophers who said, “Behold, we have open source, and GNU GPL for your software.” But the consumers compared it to commercial products which they downloaded from warez sitez, and found them lacking. And so from their long lines in front of the only computer in the office with a CD burner, they mocked these philosophers, saying, “Dream on” and “Get a life”, and turned their backs on the idea of open source, and paid tribute to commercial software companies.
But not all was lost, for the philosophers swayed some of the people, both consumers and creators saying, “Walk this way”, and in their words were prophesies of the future.
Then the age of Microsoft came to pass, and their products were good, or at least better. But the power of Microsoft grew swiftly, and soon the prince CEO was convinced by the whisperings of the tempter. And he consumed many lands, and many commercial products, and the might of his lawyers was made know, for they defended attempts to overthrow it’s great power, and and hurled insults and threats against the followers of open source.
Many who had mocked the open source philosophers had bowed down to Microsoft, and Adobe, and Corel, and idGames, but in private they continued to distribute and download warez. Those among them who had the power zipped these products, and with archives which spanned across 132 floppy disks, they enslaved the other consumers, and tempted them to hunt down passwords from pay-to-click ad links on their web sites, or else suffer at the mercy of Microsoft’s OEM distributions.
In these days there was heard a great and barbaric scream from atop the mountain where the music producers dwell, yea even the great and abominable RIAA, for they had fallen sick in their revenues, which depended on buying albums with 12 songs, but only one good one. But they persisted in their ways, and did not follow the digital path though the consumers demanded it of them. When they were confronted by their follies they lashed out, striking at consumers with one hand, while miming false promises with the other. Thus many fled the RIAA and it’s lawsuits, but many more were trampled, or made examples of. And contempt for these copyright holders grew.
Microsoft continued to weild it’s mighty power, even unto the courts of the lands, and it ran radio advertisements offering gold to those who would turn in the keepers of the warez, which were also called pirates. Thus more consumers sought the philosophers of open source, or at least their software.
And Microsoft began pushing out beta versions as final releases, and there was much wailing amongst the consumers, and many cried, “Why must we suffer under this beta version? Shall we not then cleave to open source?”
The philosophers of open source gathered followers from many lands, and creators collaborated through CSV, so that the whole was greater than the sum, and they proved their valor with Linux, and Apache, PHP, and MySQL. They gave the people distros such as Mandrake, and there were rumors in the land that an office software suite was coming, and it required no CD key, and it would be pure, for it held within it neither advertisments nor spyware.
There was also in this land scholars who dwelt behind the armored walls of the ivory tower, and students who dwelt below them in walled gardens. They saw this struggle and knew the pain of the consumers, for they felt the burden of costly textbooks, and publisher contracts, and cumbersome ePacks. They, too, were confounded, for they needed to create, consume, and reuse content. They had patronized the lawgivers, and though they had been given the TEACH act, the law was incomplete, and so yet they feared the wrath of the Copyright holder.
The open source philosophers knew of the sufferings of the creators and the consumers, the scholars and the students, and their numbers grew. Amongst them rose a few with good intent who would collaborate, and with tools for licensing, organizing, and sustaining the work, could liberate the people. For they knew that a new hunger was growing, one which could only be fed by a freedom both to take and to publish, both to share and to remix.
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