The title also seems to be incorrect. All arguments that were put by Eric or Christophe were on the management of the production process, not the license of the code.

Yet for all the name calling, ESR totally misses my point: developers need to eat, and corporations provide vast majority of the necessary funds, even to open-source contributors like ESR or myself. My XL work is all open-source, but I would not have been able to afford it without a regular source of income. That’s my point, and if ESR wrote a single word to address it, I didn’t see it.

As for claiming that open-source build the world-wide-web, sorry Eric, but that’s bollocks and you know it. I could not even find any evidence that Berners-Lee’s browser, WorldWideWeb, was open-source at the time. What everyone knows is that Berners-Lee worked for CERN at the time, in other words he had a stable revenue, and that only reinforces my point. The browser that ignited the web was not Berners-Lee’s (nobody could afford the incredibly expensive and closed-source NeXT machines that ran it) but Mosaic. And as I pointed out in my “screed”, the source code of Mosaic was public, but not open-source by any standard definition. More importantly, it is silly to ignore all the corporate contributions that made the web what it is today, from Netscape to Microsoft to Cisco to fiber-optics to ISPs…

It is legitimate to say that “Tim Berners-Lee invented the world-wide-web”. I think it is even OK to say that hackers built it. But that’s a far cry from “open-source built it”, which seems to be what ESR would want us to believe…

Ultimately, I’d say that Eric’s error number zero is to confuse “ideas” with “innovation”. Innovation is ideas made real.

That line grabbed my attention, because it characterizes the basic argument Levi-Strauss made about bricolage in Third World communities especially. He said that “bricoleurs” were capable of cobbling together different bits of existing technology or even repairing and maintaining existing technologies. They were incapable, however, of truly novel technical innovation, which could only come about within organized industrial society.

I’m startled by the resonance. It sort of reveals something about the world of formal production and what its ideology says about knowledge and the organization of knowledge.

For a conceptual opponent, Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of “nomad science” offers a wonderful contrasting view, especially with their discussion of the development of gothic architecture in Mille Plateaux.