An Engineer’s Guide to the Docuverse
lord-enki.net
lord-enki.net
The things we DO know and use daily were developed in the clear, in a public, cooperative environment. Furthermore, implementations were often protected by GPL or other means to keep them from disappearing into an IP hole.
This might be the most important lesson of the project.
I like Ted Nelson a lot, mostly because I relate to his chaotic way of thinking, and I admire his ideas, and the work he puts towards making his ideas reality even more so. Yet, even in his more recent content, he's still stubborn as ever, anyone who wants to simplify his ideas to appeal to a mainstream audience "doesn't get my vision".
He's had great ideas, great visions, but he shoots himself in the foot with hi is approach.
On the plus side, this is an interesting project: http://www.erights.org/index.html
> unique permanent addressing for immutable documents and source data
This would make _so much_ sense for programming.
If you copy a function from stackoverflow, or from github, or from a gist, or whatever, you always know where it came from, who wrote it... instead of "copying" where the code is now yours to maintain, you "refer" to it, you "include" it. No-one can tamper with the inclusion, because it is based on some kind of safe cryptography.
Wouldn't this be a great alternative/addition to apis and libraries? It would allow us to include random functions and snippets from any other codebase without ever having to worry about dependencies suddenly breaking everything with updates.
Many of the ideas, paradigms, and systems pursued by computing pioneers (especially of the 70s and 80s) feel this way, especially those that didn't catch on but are still often talked about.
I feel that technological path dependence and an overemphasis on the lowest-common-denominator user (and de-emphasis on power users) has really curtailed a lot of real innovation.