 This is the generative commons call for Wednesday, September 8th, 2021. Our goal in these calls is to figure out what a generative commons means looks like sounds like how organizations might sign up for it or agree to it, or pledge their truth to it, or something like that. The general commons, just to sort of review a little bit, is the idea that we're here to improve the commons to garden it, curate it, leave it behind for other people in a better state than it was, make it more useful than it was. And we also need to make a living while doing so. So our bias is toward openness that we also have to obey privacy in different ways. Figure out how to thread that thread that path between sharing lots of information and keeping the world sort of bound and tight in different ways. And Jack, we're seeing you but not hearing you. That's because I was out of the room. That explains everything. Yeah, and I have a driving test this morning so I don't get to stay here the full measure. Okay, okay, and wish you well for the driving test. At my age they make it it's now called a vision driving test and I have no idea what that means. Maybe they can do it all in VR now and you just put on goggles and sit somewhere. I really wish. No it's it's it's usually some battle 1960s hippie sitting next to you and he's saying yo cool man cool and right here and that kind of stuff and and so for me it's an amusing and amusing event you drive. Make a couple of right turns a couple of left turns you get on the freeway for about 500 feet blah blah blah and your home. Because it's got some kind of a vision component I guess they're going to have no idea. It's going to be interesting. I do I do remember flunking my first driving test because because there was a lady in the neighborhood, who sort of the DMV kind of intentionally asked her to grow her shrubbery big out onto the street. So it was kind of obstructive and they all they would always drive by there. And if you didn't kind of inch your way out. If you should just kind of stop and went boom, you know, let's go back to the DMV. I see that coming but but the only the only time I screwed up is they did a California stop on my, my first right turn and I thought, oh crap. And of course he you know he didn't yell and make me turn around but but he did ding me for you know, you got the merits. I got the merits. Now I hope he doesn't make me do one of those parallel parking things I have yet to see them do that but but he I meant I have a Prius and the back vision on a Prius is just horrible so it's it's doesn't have a camera and is the camera no good. Yeah, no the camera is good but but we look back you can't really see very much but you you yeah the the the back window is is like, yeah, like a sport. It's more like a tank than than a regular it's like a tank and it and it and it. It's it's very difficult. It should come with like a little prismatic turret on top that you can just spin around like they could borrow a tank innovation. Yeah, market marks got the idea right there. Well, scope. Yeah, exactly. It's periscope arm torpedoes and and the advanced models the luxury models could have photon torpedoes for bad traffic. Well, yeah, there's yeah, or not. I mean, we don't need to go that way that probably would make a mess of traffic but still, I think you need a disintegrator to just remove the atoms. You need a rematerializer or or better. Well, or more orderly or rematerialize you want to have Papa rotor and just take off and, you know, I've long, you know, ever since I was in college studying aeronautical engineering I, I dreamed of, you know, going down the freeway and just lifting often. Well, there was a moment in the 30s, I think, maybe 40s, but early like I think pre war, where everybody figured out that helicopters are really inexpensive to make and everybody was picturing there would be just urban and suburban helicopter travel. And everybody would like own a simple chopper and you could fold the rotors you could you could tuck an air helicopter in your garage much faster than you could tuck an airplane, because the auto car the flying car has been a thing forever and never really work. You could go buy models you could go buy today and good luck to you as well. But the chopper thing, you know, and now we're getting the multi bladed cop choppers like the hexacopters quadcopters and all that, and some of them electric and some of this is actually really viable. Like really viable for short term transportation that your problem is your traffic control noise and privacy liability when things fall out of the sky it's a little harder than when you just bump in the corner. I understand that flying an airplane of any kind is not like driving a car you just don't pull over to the curb when something's wrong you know I mean. Bingo. Exactly. Exactly. Really is you and your maker up there and if you screw up, you're made you're done, you meet your maker it's like, it's like a, it's like a meet and greet it's like speed dating. Yeah, and one reason why I never learned to fly, although I was tempted a couple times in life was, and the same thing for rock climbing is that I don't want my epitaph to say Jerry died doing something completely optional. Now that's interesting because I tried to die doing that completely optional I crashed an airplane I built once but nice. Oh, you built the kit plane. No, I built it from scratch. I bought a set of plans and oh my God, and built it. I can I can send you a link to a video of me test flying somebody else's of the same model. I would or plexiglass or what aluminum aluminum to two seater all all aerobatic. Lowering sports plane, aerobatic aluminum aircraft hand built. Yeah, holy crap. Okay, that's really cool. I did that right out of high school and and I flew it for about three years and then stacked it in Chasta Lake. So is it still lying in Chasta Lake somewhere. No, I hired a boat to pull it up it was it was down in 70 feet of water and they, they hooked a tide of rope around the, the, the tail wheel and used a speedboat to pull it over to a ramp and and then we tied the rope to a car and it pulled it up and awesome. That's cool. Thank you. I had no idea about that part of your past. I was on topic for the call I was going to ask you to just free associate on the topic, because you've been at this for a really long time, which topic, the generative commons topic not the how do we overcome traffic with aircraft topic. Yeah, but they're the same because the air is a commons and we're going to use it you know what I mean, it's, it's, and we don't use it well already. Yes. And, and so, so I have a lot of faith in a small percentage of human human kind to do the right thing and a terribly low faith and the rest of the people I just don't think it's almost as if they don't want to do the right thing. So then, which begs the question, why a commons. Who is the commons for is it just for the elite who, who get it, or is it trying to save everybody. It's trying to save everybody. Yeah. Well, that's, I'm on that mission but it's there, there are times when, you know, you you run into I have, you know, this this this nurse at Kaiser the other day and I told her that it was only a matter of for Kaiser mandates. COVID vaccinations for for providers and she says, why they better not and she just started screaming. Wow. Wow. Yeah. So, so my, my part of my amateur theory of history and humans is that we are stupider than we normally would be as humans because we're being we've been treated as mere consumers for 100 years. And that makes us really dumb it makes us stupid and makes us manipulate. And also, we don't have a shared memory, which makes us stupider as well. So the kind of compounding bless you. The compounding of those factors has has made us more like the movie idiocracy than any other like interesting kind of cooperative scenario. But I but my amateur theory of history also includes the fact that those bands of humans who didn't manage to kill themselves off which humans were very good at back in the day actually learned how to live in community on the Commons. And they passed that wisdom down orally, which is not respected by writing traditions they're like no way they could have known all this stuff. And they understood very deeply what what things would heal you in the forest and what would kill you how to how to tune the landscape to optimize it for food and shelter and resources and everything else. Etc. Not that there wasn't occasional fighting but that the more intelligent of us managed to live really well and didn't spend a lot of time gathering food and had I think a pretty interesting existence and many of those cultures for matrilineal there's a whole bunch of other funky things there. Anyway, my amateur and naive hope is that leaving interesting things at hand that actually might resolve some of those issues like hey we're about to have an argument but there's a there's a widget that just popped up on my phone that says, instead of an argument consider doing this. And we've just ordered you for free we've ordered you like a couple beers, and there's a table like like to your right just go sit there and answer these four questions with each other and see how that works. I don't know I'm making that up but but what if wisdom from all the different you know wisdom which is prisoner in little books around the world was instead loose in the Commons and then instrumented to be available and useful at a point of a point of need. What if that were the case wouldn't that help up our game as humans. So let me inject my theory of the Commons that the builds on. This is not a yes but it's a yes and I'm very pleased it's not a complete reputation so please proceed. Look, there's an old saying it's the people stupid. Yes, and I believe that to be the case. Now you were talking about. What is the stupid people. I'll point that out. That's the point. I mean, somebody said it's the economy stupid well actually the economy is based on the people so it's the people stupid let's get it right now that's reductionist thinking but it's, it's it's reductionist in a very complex way, because of all of the feedback loops. My, my, look, Engelbart had the clearest picture he was, you know he was passionate about technology but he was more passionate about people. He called them the human systems and the tool systems, and he wanted to put them together and he called the combination of the human systems and the tool systems and the knowledge in there that was called a dynamic knowledge repository. And, and when I went to Korea to talk about DK ours, Ted Con read my speech and says oh god no don't call it a dynamic knowledge repository call it a dynamic knowledge garden. So that's what I said in my speech. And it took root but the Korean said would you drop dynamic we like two words and so it became knowledge garden which is a term that everybody used for kindergarten and children schools and so forth, and now everybody uses it for everything they do. You know, so knowledge gardening is out there no I didn't invent the term noted Ted Con, but, but together we sort of brought it into the conversation at an HR forum and in soul in 2007. And, and the whole point of gardening is the people and the plants the things they do in the garden and their social interactions and the plants have roots and they form growing interactions they form relationships so it's it's all relational and that's the key point. And people who deny that climate is changing, or people who claim that they don't want to take a vaccine are not being relational be there being very self centered and and that's okay that's who we are where people and people it's the people stupid. And so I figured, somewhere along the way I figured if you're talking about common still. How are you going to have a commons if people don't know how to behave it. Now it is true that that that you spoke of people historically forming commons yeah they were called tribes and and the great religions were one of the things that exploded in the middle of that. And, used to say he said you know the original, the origins of of religion started in the in the, in the rain makers, he said picture yourself. You're a child and your father's the rain makers for your tribe, and he gets stoned to death because he didn't bring the rain. So now you've become the facto rain maker and in a few years into it you find out that you didn't get any rain. And here they come with the stones and what do you do. You think about it for a while and before they start throwing stones you say the gods are angry with you. It's your fault it's not me. It's not on me. It's on you. And thus was born the idea of some higher entity in control of stuff and damn it you better not piss him off. Why rain and why not the animals didn't show up on season this year why why is it rain. Look, I can't speak for Murray Murray Bookshan I don't even think he's alive anymore. Yeah, he's been dead a while I think he he he invited me to teach summer school with him at Vermont a bunch of years ago and that's when I heard his lecture and I take it as stock you know that's what he said now am I claiming that he was quoting from scripture himself I don't think so. It's probably an invention of his. I don't know. I didn't do any diligence on the claim I just like it and it sounds right it feels good. And so I'm totally on board with that logic. Yeah, and so so I'm not I'm not saying it's it's I'm not pontificating here I'm just using it as a story to say, this is how common used to work. And, and, you know, yeah, we get, you know, from from Navajos and American natives and so on and so forth that they had commons and although they were tribes and they were separate tribes and this and that and the other thing. Now, how come they're not in and I actually think that silos and tribes are beneficial. They're not a belief system a mechanism a social thing. And what we need to do is not kill them, not take down the walls, but to allow them to federate and thus I begin to talk about knowledge Federation, how do you share. What can you share into the commons now I'm talking now about a global Federation, which is a kind of a global commons and I tend to think that's what you talk about. I'm talking about a commons and yes I support that 1000% and not to the detriment, or anything in a danger of the existing private tribe, tribal commons okay, I want them to stay I believe they exist. I'm not sure I believe that borders should exist physical land borders, because they aren't physical they're just marks on a piece of paper and an agreement. But be that as it may I'm interested in Federation and for the knowledge commons which is my focus, which lies at that intersection of human systems and tool systems that's where I put my work and you asked me to talk about that. And what so I'm asking in the middle of all of this, why should I go and try and make topic maps of everything if people can't put in decent, you know, let's let's just say not dishonest factors into the knowledge commons. I got to thinking it, you know, we need to build a place where people can improve themselves, because Engelbart talked about improvement communities. And he was speaking about improving human systems and improving tool systems well let's let's focus for a minute on improving human systems. And so when when I had just finished doing a research enough to defend the PhD thesis proposal on on a topic that I call taming conversations using it. It's done a lot of studying of World of Warcraft and their guilds and the sociology and mechanics and the dynamics and so on and so forth of of role playing games and avatars and guilds and so on and so forth. So when Martin Radley stood up at a, at a, at a conversation meeting in Palo Alto at eight in the morning in 2010 and said, how can, how can, how can we have civil conversations online about politics. The room said you need to talk to park and so we had coffee on that morning and I said, he said what's your answer and I said World of Warcraft meets global sense making. And in that in my mind in that instance, which is one of the ways I'm, I'm somewhat creative it's usually in a conversation and just things, things emerge that weren't preplanned but they were clearly preceded. In other words, there were the all the ideas were there all the ducks were there, and they just lined up in the conversation I just said, you need what avatars and guilds bring to the table. That is the discipline of behaving in a guild in concert with other members learning how to collaborate learning, learning how to do deep listening and all of the rest of it. And that was the day we formed topic quest. And so I'm on that mission it's the people stupid and I, I, as, as you know, I now call it quest as a service it's, it's a, it's a, an emerging technology. Which, which allows people to join guilds and to go on quests about matters that matter this is not about the legends of Gelda and all of the rest of it where you're going in caves and driving tanks and, you know, shooting and killing. This is about finding the best answers you can to the quest. And then, having a conversation not a pissing contest but a conversation which includes elements of debate in a structured conversation with other guilds. That's that's that's the platform, and it's it's about growing a generation or two of people who could actually not vote for Donald Trump, you know what I'm saying. They would see through him the moment he started talking. I mean when I was raising kids we would have them sit and watch commercials on TV and I would ask them, what, what, what do you think of what he's saying. And I would get them to think things through way below the surface of what the commercial was trying to tell you. And that's what, that's what, what doing quests on matters that matter climate change women's rights, voting rights blah blah blah you name it. We'll get people to do. That's kind of my big picture. What I call it is is pride of ownership. When a real estate take real estate salesman takes you around and says, so you want to see this what they're, what they do is they park you across the street to look over the curb view of the home and get you to feel like oh my God I really want to own that you know what I'm saying. And they'll usually do it in the evening rather than the day when when you can't see the potholes on the road and all the rest of it. And, and, and they speak of pride of you're going to be so proud of owning this home. And what I want you to be as proud of owning the knowledge it allowed you to think things through. That's a different kind of psychology than pride of owning a cigarette lighter that's gold plated you know what I mean. We got to fix the people dammit. When I moved to Connecticut, a realtor showed me a place and, and immediately a couple days after I realized that they had driven to the place through the scenic route. Yep, and the front of that that access to the place was was beautiful and idyllic and right behind it was like crap and the railroad and yeah neighborhood and it's like yeah they were strategic. So, so one of the reasons I hate the word consumer and that I'm so happy to have discovered that years ago is that I believe that treating us as mere consumers disconnected us from one another because your job as a consumer is to consume more stuff. You know, share the stuff that's not good to the economy, etc, etc. So, so by disconnecting us from each other, it took away our response sense of mutual responsibility. It stopped the passing of wisdom and knowledge along community lines it deprecated community to the point where Margaret Thatcher is famously quoted as saying there is no such thing as society. And that and that so, so having been treated as mere consumers for 100 years has has sort of weakened our state and and not just impoverished us mentally, but separated us intentionally where rugged individualism is like the norm, and that that couples itself really nicely to the American individualism, personal freedom, all that kind of thing like and if you can harness these things and yoke them to some dark purpose like maintaining power as a minority party over the most powerful country on earth which is sort of what's happening right now. Everybody's out well, like like there's their able right now the Senate is sort of in lock up because mansion is saying like 3.5 trillion little big, maybe, maybe one. And everybody's like holy shit. And that's, you know, and that's because right over right opposite the on the other side of that precipice is Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell and the rest of the of the American Republican Party which is apparently I've got a thought in my brain the GOP has become a suicide cult. Because the party that has nothing to lose in a contest is the one that's more likely to win. This is this is all very interesting you have to remember that Bush to stood at ground zero and said, don't let them win go back to shopping. And, and mansion is to me, a very interesting study. He claims to be a moderate, and he's behaving like a moderate. Now, the those, those people who are out in the skirts on the left, hating, because he's not out in the skirts he's closer to the center of the bell. And, and he's arguing for what the center would normally argue for and that's moderation. But the times don't really need moderation at the moment we need to kickstart something that's that's clearly in trouble. But there is a reality we're saddling our children with what that means in terms of you know, the debt has to be paid it's not going to go away by itself nobody wave a magic wand. That's how the title of the article I just went through he told us to go shopping now the bill is due. And now the bill is due yes and and and so there's a part of me that that really, really wants to defend mansions, moderate stance. There's a part of me that says, but he needs to find a way to moderate his moderate stance and learn how to make exceptions. Right. And, but at least he's there, he's one of the few that's there that's trying to bring things back to the middle. Right. Yeah, and that's my view, like, exactly and what's an end culture. I'm going to bring out the culture into the conversation right now. I think there's no E&M. So, and culture serves a really or used to serve like in the 90s used to serve an incredibly powerful. She was the the Kellyanne before Kellyanne Conway and culture service incredibly powerful role in that she's one of the rights culture warriors in that she writes a book called treason liberal church. From the Cold War to the war on terrorism. She basically says liberals are traders, guilty liberal victims and their assault on America etc etc. She puts a stake so far out on the right. Short of let's kill them all short of just recommending genocide, but she puts a stake so far on the right that humans average we normalize we sort of go oh well, the truth must be a little a little closer toward that. There were multiple people doing this in fact there was a whole media apparatus to do this created intentionally by the right by the far right there's the whole echo chamber of the far right that worked, and it continues to work to the point where interrupting it dismantling it figuring out how to get back to reasoned conversation about stuff where we might differ on tactics but not on the end goals would be a would be a lovely thing to start approaching. You know, I've got a bunch of clips of videos. I've got I've got a resistance to masking and vaccination hits new ugly highs and there's some, you know, there's some people basically showing up at school boards and city councils and stuff like that. So, going nuts and threatening people who are just trying to do their jobs, who didn't who not getting paid enough to take this kind of risk, never mind abuse, because this is turning go violence so sorry to sorry to wander off off into the fields for a second but I just want to say that this, this set of misunderstandings pumped intentionally has extremely serious consequences that were busy suffering through this this month, like right now. So I want to continue on the thing about Commons and talk to you about a topic that I understand this group is interested in and it's basically IP rights. Yes, I was going to steer you there if you weren't heading that way. I am because I don't have much time left. Oh, that's right. You've got to go. And, and so you got to go show them that your baby driver that may not be a reference for you but Well, going to the DMV is is to me is is very stressful. You know what I'm saying. I do. And, and, and it, it used to be worse when you actually finally get to a to to a counter and talk to a human. They're pretty civil now they weren't always but they're pretty damn civil now. But it's the process of getting to the counter and getting it blah blah it's that's, that's a major event. By the way, good morning, Jack. Good morning Mark, it's really great. Yeah, just mark is just one of my favorite people you know I'm saying. Well, can I just take this minute Jack to say that there have been at least five times that I've been talking and my friend Sam Han has said, you should talk to Jack. We're not you should talk to me said, Jack Park has something he thinks just like that that's what he says so many times so I'm so happy you're on the call, because I understand now why he said that. But with that introduction I'm delighted that you're on the call as well Sam is another one of my really favorite people. Same here. So, so, and he lives on this really gorgeous island up north and Jerry you know I mean but and you know I've spent some time there and it's it's it's really I wouldn't mind moving there if I could get away with it. He's trying to get me to visit but I still have a dog so until until. Yeah, bring your dog with you. I have no way I would have to in New York. So I would have trouble. That's a big drive. Well bugs can go on airplanes but that's too stressful for them. Right, I used to be able to go with him on my lap, but they just changed that. That's all changed yeah and and it's, you have to drug them to put them on a plane. They have to be vacuum sealed. I'm not doing that. So back to IP. We have this thing called open source. And open source got kind of mutated to something called fast or free and open source. And so when you say open source now everybody assumes that it's free and open source. And the, the new people are kind of the globes Nazis on that whole idea of free and open source. And in that space. The, there are licenses on the software that you can put out the first one. Basically, the earliest licenses obviously came from MIT and they basically say don't sue us. That's about all they say, you're right to use this as go for it and enjoy and make babies and have fun and don't sue us. And, and, and then Berkeley sort of added a few little statements now they said you could make three babies and that kind of stuff but it's still the same. Totally permissive and then Apache came along a foundation that that sort of hosts, thousands of, of, of projects, the Apache license was really the kind of like the Berkeley BSD MIT license. And, but then the GNU people came up with the GPU general public something GPL general. And, and, and it had a, it was draconian. It became what was known as a viral license and the viral license basically said, yeah, you can do anything you want with us. But if you use it in any product you make that product also has to be GNU public license. In other words, you can't just wire commercial private stuff to our platform. The only sort of major exception to that is Linux, and Linux is GPL and the internals, but they allow you to use it through what are called calls API calls. And so you didn't actually compile your software against their code you compile it against their call structure. And so that means you can put even a commercial private prototype proprietary thing on top of, of Linux and you know, lots and lots of people do that. But, but what happened was is that the way the GPL license was worded. It said if you publish, and I'll publish to them in those days meant you put it on the web and let people download it, the software. But it didn't cover the fact that you used it except you were only use it as a server and nobody could actually see your code. And so the Afro company said, Oh, wait a minute. We're going to write the AG peel which added another thing which extended publish to mean if you turn it on as a server and other people can access the server. Okay, and so that was that was the Ebola of viral licenses it's just really really nasty. So along comes Neo4j, which was a Java graph database that ultimately be it was basically the Rolls Royce of graph databases it's really professional really powerful. And they had what they called the community version which was GPL. And then they made what they called the enterprise version, and that was a GPL. And they thought that was good enough, except that they thought that one of their business models was they were going to do Neo4j graph clouds. Except that Amazon thought that was a pretty cool business model so they just opened a bunch of Neo4j clouds. They just made it a cloud platform in in the AWS offerings, which took away the business from Neo4j. So Neo4j just took the enterprise version off the market, except they left it on GitHub. And then they went down and found the last of the enterprise versions brought it up and re productize it under a different name. Seriously, I didn't use her. However, there is a difference what that that last version of Neo4j that's that's available is something called open graph.org or something like that. Is not what you can get today if you buy the enterprise version. They completely rewritten it. Fast forward to MongoDB, AGPL all along. No problem. And the way AGPL people would get around people whaling and moaning about it was they would make Apache license clients for it. So now you could use MongoDB and not make everything you do viral, because you're talking to it through an Apache client. And that's pretty cool. So Mongo went out and did everything right and became extraordinarily popular and they opened their Mongo cloud and then of course Amazon cloned it and put it online. So now there's a Mongo cloud at Amazon. And so, so, so Mongo, by the way, the same thing happened to elastic search. They weren't even viral. I think they were, I think that they were Apache or they were, they were something other than than AGPL. And because I used it a lot. And, and all of a sudden Amazon is making elastic clouds. And so both elastic search and aid of and Mongo. They re-licensed their product to what's what they call something like a server side license. It is still technically open source, but it's not free anymore. In other words, you can use it all you want. But the minute you start making money with it, they want a piece of it, which my mind is fair. Okay. In my mind is fair, but it goes against the commons Nazis that think, no, that's not free. Damn you, you've violated the whole trust of the whole ecosystem, which is not true. But it's the mantra today. It's, it's what people are saying. And, and you wanted to talk about the commons. I'm telling you, it's not a trivial topic. So, thank you for that path. And in particular, I knew little bits and pieces of this as I've been showing with the brain like I, you know, I have, I have all these entities in there but I don't have the thread connected to power pharaoh changes things and the AGPL and, and all those details to it. And I didn't realize that when things are using Linux, they're firewalling themselves legally by making calls rather than, you know, connecting closer that the API has provided legal insulation in some sense, that allows this ecosystem to work. Right. That's really interesting. I didn't know that I've never looked at sort of the legal. I know about the GNU GPL being viral I know about, you know, people were really corporate lawyers startup lawyers were really worried about using or touching anything GNU related, lest the rest of their software suddenly be infected, like ice nine and suddenly be in the commons legally they didn't want that. That's for sure. When we did Kalo at at SRI. We, we told the DoD we were going to make it's it's it's fundamentally a semantic desktop open source. And they said what license, and they said you can't use GPL. Now, let's go back to GPL for a moment. Remember the Apache license did not have anything about it that was beyond the idea of have a good time and don't sue us. Except that the GPL license had had a had one clause in it that even Doug Engelbart asked me about. And it was the clause that said basically if you do anything with this product that you patented and the patent blocks us from the use of this, this, this software, you're right to use the software is null and void. So basically a dead man switch on the software on patenting and blocking. Okay, right. Apache finally got religion and put that clause in the license and it's now called the Apache 2 license, which didn't exist when, when, when, when, when Kalo was being built. And so we went to what is called the GNU GPL GPL license which is called the less or less or GPL license. And it is not viral. It has all of the clauses of GPL except the viral clauses which makes it functionally the equivalent of a, of a well written Apache 2. And so, so we use the LGPL license on on on on our project called open iris for for for the DoD on the Kalo project. So here's Kalo and here's iris. Yes, I don't know if I have open iris. And here's the website we gave it open.org. Here's open iris I didn't put a web web link to it back then but I have the link and here's the iris semantic desktop. And I, here's Adam Chair. Yeah, and Adam Chair is the one that set up open iris and for a while it was taken offline but it may be back online I don't recall. Yep. Apparently he's a Rubik's cube champion. And he was a Rubik's cube champion and he's, he's actually a magician. Oh really. And he actually did a show who are the two, the two, the two pen and teller pen and teller. Yeah, they have a show where you fool us or something like that fool me. And he did, and he used a card deck as Siri, and he did a magic trick with with on their show. And, and, in fact, he, no he didn't fool. He did a pen and teller show pen and teller fool us. And so he did he did it. Adam Chair did a did an episode of that. Cool. So here's a guy named Julio Marino who did fool them with some sleight of hands and close in magic tricks. Anyway, super cool and before you have to go, because I think you probably your timer is probably running out right now. So what's a fair way to practitioners to make a living and organizations to make a living while sharing as much as possible separate from organizations that are just going to sell code and access to code which you've covered really really really well here. Well, so this is a, this is a field, which is now becoming known as professional open source. And, and to me the signature professional open source was JBoss. JBoss.org JBoss.com. JBoss was for French guys that that decided to implement the Java enterprise edition son went and put the specification for J2 EE online. But they declared it wasn't going to be open source because it was going to be son's way of making money. Except a whole bunch of little companies went and started making open source versions of J2 EE. And JBoss was one of them and Scott McNeely went around and got most all of them to shut down. And the, the, the JBoss people said, no, we're not going to do it. And so you know there's a whole bunch of online lore about the pissing contest that happened over that, never mind. The point is is that JBoss became one of the most powerful open source web server platforms ever made. And the point that you know that that IBM went and started using the Apache server for the IBM server and in fact, IBM did the right things. They dropped what a half million dollars into the Apache foundation and made major improvements to the source code and gave those back to the Apache people with a license required that they do that. So, so when HP went looking for something to compete with Microsoft SQL server, they took JBoss. So you see there was this whole thing going on with JBoss it was powerful I can remember at one, one point. There were more downloads at Sourceforge than there were PCs in America, you know what I mean. It was just being downloaded I know I downloaded it four or five times, making improvements. Wait a sec, sorry, give me a sec. Yep. Give me a second. Hey, your warranty is out of date you could renew it with by following this spam call that that's the one. And so, so. So and by the way just interrupt your story for a second I have a whole. I interviewed Bob LeBlanc back in the day, an IBM or who was kind of on duty when IBM woke up and adopted Apache Linux, and then started contributing Eclipse to the world so I know a bunch about that particular piece of the story. No, and it's an awesome story there are times when you know IBM did all the right things and and if they open sourced Watson that would be a super right thing but they're probably not going to do that. If only there were a project called open Sherlock. Well, so. Yeah, well it was actually going to be called open Watson but like that. It's a little too close to home. Jim force and I don't think you want to do that. So, so, which is fine. But it, it, it's IBM did do part of the right thing they went around the country they wrote a lot of papers on the technology and they went around and lectured on it. So they did spread the word but they didn't spread the code, but never mind that. So, so J Boss did not put up a lot of documentation on the J Boss server and it was a very complex the whole install cycle it was it was very, very complex. But they wrote a book, you had to pay 60 bucks for the apprentice hall book and I bought it everybody did, but they did something else. They were, they were selling service, they were selling training courses. They were selling $1000 for a weekend of training on on it and then they had a series of them all the way up to certified J Boss installer. And this is the sacred sauce now also they did a bunch of other right things when the open source community came to them and said we need a place to put up our versions of documents they gave them website. So they created a community. The community became a sales and service community with and the and the pitch was look, you can go and you can, you can take a lease on the Microsoft SQL server and it's going to cost you this much per seed and this much per blah blah blah. Or you can pay me $1000 and I'll just install the server and it's yours. And everybody started saying that's what we want. So they grew this monstrous enterprise around sales and service. And a guy comes along from from the, from the Silicon Valley and walks into the J Boss office and says here's 10 million bucks, what'll you do with it. They said we'll take it and they gave him a piece of the action. And they went out and they bought up a bunch of other open source platforms that made J Boss better to ensure that they would be around. And then along comes red hat. Who's got this thriving open source platform and no service, no sales. And they bought J Boss. And they left the entire J Boss ecosystem open source. And they wanted to embrace and embrace and extinguish they simply just bought them and kept them going. So, so that's, that's a variant of professional open source. Now my version is I don't want the VC exit strategy. If I'm going to put up a quest as a service, I don't want the profit incentive to come in and hijack it downstream. I want it to be pristine for life. And so, so that's that's my view on this whole open source ecosystem and professional open source you asked about business models yeah I do think that cloud services are one of the approaches is obviously sales and service and training, and so on and so forth. I could go deeper but that's the surface of it. Wow. Absolutely love that. Mark, do you want to jump in and riff on any any or all of that. Um, I have been a gosh developer since 84. It sounds that segment of the market was well covered by Jack. But what about, what about framings for how you would like to participate in a generative commons fueled by the stories Jack just told what else does this mean, because we're trying to we're trying to figure out what does a generative commons agreement look like. And that's where, where people can come into the world Jack just described and the content world that Brewster Kale wrestles with every day, and everything else right and and trade marks and patents and God knows what, and invent stuff together for the good of the mind and benefit from it individually yet yet we've most of it usable most of it in the in this commons thing. And one of my lessons in pursuing this path of logic was that a good commons kind of needs to be protected sort of like. So, if a repo can be forked endlessly. It can also be forked and then miss, you know, misused repurposed, neutered whatever. So you kind of need to know which is the legit version, and which is the neutered version. And that's a form of protection is like hey, hey, you know, ignore that fork, even though they were able to fork this that fork basically took the fangs out of out of what this software supposed to be good for follow you know these these things in fact are really fruitful anyway I'm just making this up but. But I'm trying to figure out like how do we create an agreement that's useful and interesting and different from and builds on the creative commons, a gpl lgpl all the kinds of things that Jack just told us about, but but not just about soft shared shared code. That's a problem I haven't solved. But to me by many different people. I want to invent this. I don't want somebody else to patent it. And boy, worldwide protection in that category of swimming with sharks, I have no idea. So, so rather than rather than tackling the whole enchilada of like solving for the whole problem. Any little pieces of that that are appealing different or any other ingredients you would add to the stew. Because I realized this is, we've been sitting here having generative comments calls for a while. When Michael is in the conversation he's like, what do I do with my company playing in this pond like how does that work and we haven't actually solved those things and we don't have a draft of a generative comments agreement. So we have generative commons.org we own that there's sort of nothing on it. What, what could we say that that what can we say that's additive to what already exists. Some little slice. Second call. Haven't worked it out. Yeah, and we're that we're at the top of the hour already so let's let's continue this next Wednesday is what I'm thinking right now, if that's okay with you all. But I'm really interested in this I want to figure out how GM can help sponsor spark foster nurture steward, an environment within which we actually share what we know and try to make the world better. Stacy. It's a, it's a question. Totally different always ask the good questions. What would go it's really outside the box question but what would this look like if the coders didn't have to didn't have to depend on making their money from the code. Great. Right. That's my question. I mean, there's a lot of the box I mean, there's enough disasters happening and, you know, the relief funds that went to humans during lockdown that are now being dropped and stopped were a form of an experiment of universal basic basic income kind that you could look at this as one big UBI experiment, and the economy is in enough like danger that UBI that even conservatives and in particularly libertarians are like gosh maybe we'll need a UBI. I'm like, wait, who said that, but I'm not even thinking about UBI because that's good. I'm thinking about the generative commons actually generating income but not from code. And that's why I keep talking about this whole show thing. I know you don't like the idea of the attention economy I know you don't like that analogy. But when we're talking like when Jack was talking about only trusting a certain amount of people, or, you know, a lot of people talk about they don't want to do the right thing. There are some people that it would be better if they go shopping, or it would be better if they watch TV. What if something were created that they wanted to buy attention was that was created by the good people it's their choice if I sit in front of my desk every day. That's my choice. But now if I'm watching good stuff that might help me to learn, like when Jeff talked about how he told his kids you know ask them questions about advertising. I didn't learn that till I got to college. But I kind of had some of that in me. That's what motivated me to learn. If we had a commons that was creating content like that, that people wanted to buy into. And again, this is, I stay with I don't understand the technology part. I'm about the social part of it. So one of the things I wanted to talk to you about was actually starting that experiment, like I know you said you bought creative commons. Now I don't know what that means Jack so you know I don't. I don't know the commons. Yeah. Okay, so I know nothing about technology but I do understand about the fabric of weaving communities. And I don't want to go all over the place but I was going to say to you. What about it as an experiment. This is embarrassing. I would like to. What about if we can't even put it into words. It's one of those domains, and actually saw who was willing to get together and actually create a place almost like a social club where we used to have salons like you know almost like a group of salons. And we just started one step at a time to see how that evolves. So I would say to you, I would love to take lead on this and if this ever generates anything 90% of profit stays in the commons. I want 10% and expenses just as an experiment. Somebody else comes on that says all right we'll help set up this space and and would they negotiate their experiment one step at a time. But the fun part is like how I think most of us enjoyed this call. There would be lots of these calls in that social place. So, what good. So you're kind of describing OGM already, like, if only we knew somebody who likes to run salons, like I love running salons. If there's a good if there's a really valid criticism of OGM it's like, gosh it's more like a salon than anybody who gets things done. And I'm really desperate to get more things done. But but we could spawn off we could basically sort of replicate a piece of this name it what you'd like and and let and have you just like run it control it do whatever and buying and buying a new domain and getting a domain for an activity. A piece of cake 12 bucks one hour later you have a domain and a website that's online I can do that in instant. So I own a whole basket of domains because I love doing that and I've done very little with them but but you know, generative commons.org was a moment a moment to buy and put up so if you wanted to buy show game.org instead of game show and start start building something on top of it. I don't even need but here's the thing I don't the game show idea was the first idea I don't even need that what I'm talking about is many salons. So this Jerry salon. I'm sure Gil would like a salon. You know, there would be. Yeah, so you're also describing the idea of weaving the world and the big fungus which is, if we can all feed the big fungus weaving the world would be one of a multitude of shows whose purpose would all be feeding the big fungus under the generative commons umbrella whatever the heck that means. Yeah, so you were talking about the salon spinning out something we already did that when you know I poked you one day and said we need a way to harvest Jerry's brain out to the outer world, and you said fine and so we created what was called free Jerry's free and made it a private group and specifically limited to basically the new done bar number which is five people, and we got a crap ton done in a very short period of time and then after we had accomplished harvesting Jerry's brain out into Jason Lobbs, the group sort of turned into just a shit pile of people gabbing like we are now. And, and, you know, so I don't go to free Jerry Jerry's brain anymore because it's off topic. It was created for a topic and I would say that if you're going to create a subject centric or topic centric. You should just do that, that guilt, you know what I mean, and then disband it and do something else. A brief tangent on free Jerry's brain love free Jerry's brain been on all the calls because I'm the Jerry who's being freed. I'm not free yet so we didn't achieve any part of that we met it to export my brain somewhere but it's not useful. The useful things have shown up along the way, for example, Pete would like to import the exported brain into massive wiki. And we, you know, a mark on twan is building some stuff that could could come on to it, but partly I would like to find funding so that those can be small funded projects that they could like actually get rewarded for. We did not go there you're only just now starting to talk about finding funding but there was a there was a six month gap after actually getting the Jason blobs. We should have stopped there and said now what do we do with it and don't let the group grow and bring in other people who don't understand the conversation and blah blah blah and because it crept up from the first five people to eight or nine pretty quickly and after a few hours out of the room, it's gone. That's the whole point of creating a space where people could go off and gab like you said, but they still feel part of that community and the people doing the work, who also like to gab are still part of the community, but they're in the back rooms doing the work to set it up. The only other thing I want to say is the difference, the way I'm thinking it's not about going out and getting people. It's about creating a space that people want to come to. And those people that don't believe in the generative commons that are all profit. When, when Jack talked about how they created a sales force that would do it for them, or they're going to need they're going to want to come here because the talent is going to be here, not going to be in the salons it's going to be in the back room. So, so the, the, the complex adaptive systems science says that if you want to get people to self organize you need fundamentally an attractor base you need something to do and they, you know, among the stories in this space is the story of the Red Cross. The Red Cross is just a kind of a group's loosely banded people and tellers and emergency and then they swarm on the project, they deal with it, and they disband again. Okay, and so that's a model of self organization. Self organization has a lot of complex things inside going on the ways of communication the ways of tagging things the ways of marking things the ways of rewarding things. So on and so forth, probably one of, I think one of the best authors in this space that's approachable is john Holland and his books on on complex adaptive systems and emergence. These are books that are well worth, worth, worth studying. He talks about something called the bucket brigade is a reward system. So you got it, you got a pot of, of 10 units of reward and you're going to reward it to somebody for a game move but if you, if you if you reward them for that move you need to reward the people that set up that move that could be made. And so you're, you're rewarding, declining pieces of that reward bit up the up the pull the ladder to to five, six, 10 people whatever that that set up the generation to litigate the genome that allowed that person to accomplish that task. And so these these are complex parts of, of a common that need to be thought through. Is it john Henry Holland which of the Hollens but I just I just showed three john Hollens that are in my brain. Is it the psychologist genetic algorithm guy. Yeah, no that's him. Okay, good, I'll go find more of his books and put them in. And then I was just showing a slightly macabre story that that's what you're saying, which is this lovely Ted talk by Dan Barber who talks about Eduardo Sosa a chef who loves foie gras, and hates the fact that you have to force feed yeast to make foie gras. So he buys this plot of land in Spain that's just a beautiful plot of land and turns the land into heaven for geese. Basically, geese make that their normal migrate migration stop it becomes a visa for geese. And then he harvest a few of them, and they but they become naturally fat, and the and the foie gras from Sousa and labour debt is now apparently like among the world's most it's ethical foie gras. And it's one of the world's delicacies and highly prized by chefs because they can do the ugly foie gras thing without force feeding geese. Anyway, how do you create foie gras for for Commons nurturers who want to build this stuff together. Right, how do we create the conditions and the reward mechanisms. And I'm very leery of explicit reward mechanisms. So, so there's the you know extrinsic rewards are different from intrinsic rewards and when you when you add extrinsic you often kill intrinsic. Right if people are motivated because they want to contribute to the comments you suddenly say, I'm going to put a number after your name and reward you by how big your number is that totally changes the dynamics of the community. You have to be careful and delicate with it but it's but it's important it's really important in particular if you expect any humans to make a living by doing this, which we'd like them to do, which then takes us back to see what you were saying, and I was just bringing you behind in the conversation because one of the possible futures that's in our lifetimes is that we don't need to worry about making a living from the stuff we make because we'll have some sort of guarantee that we can kind of, you know, put food on the family. How much is Facebook worth? How much is Facebook worth? Facebook I have a whole lot you can just do market cap of Facebook and find out I need to, and I need to wrap this call pretty soon but I change locations for a sec, but keep going. No, because my point is, imagine if imagine if we had the audience of Facebook on that generative Commons link that we just talked about with the salons, and we were all owners in it. Imagine that kind of money. Now, now, people that wanted to come on, they could pay for it, or the services, because they would find so many people within that society. I'm talking really about creating, you know, not like, yeah, like a society of a set but in terms of different tribes, other tribes are welcome. If they're not in in the beginning, they have to either decide to join and follow that culture, or pay and keep their own, and that's fine. That's keeping choice in a system. And I think choice is really important. There's a whole bunch of levers of system design and you're mentioning about them here and I think that we'd have to think through, where's the system, what's the core who joins how all these protocols, and some of which we've been like for ODM itself and haven't really like landed on things but but I like where you're where you're pointing. I happen to think it would be enjoyable if a handful of people wanted to have a call and just dream a little. Just imagine just the first step. The first step is, all right, so we're going to, we're going to set up this thing. Who wants to play? Raise your hand. I mean, you know, just to start and see what happens and see the conflicts. Agreed. I've got to shift places entirely so we should probably wrap the call. This has been awesome. I think we can pick up here for next Wednesday. Go ahead Stacy. Would it be possible to, I don't know how much effort it takes to get a transcript of today's call? So the only calls that automatically get a transcribed are the Thursday check-in calls because we're using Collective Next Zoom and they pay like an Enterprise Zoom account, which has Otter.ai attached to it. And Otter does the transcripts. Pete Kaminsky uses Amazon Web Services translation somehow magically I don't know, but we could do that. And I'm going to download the audio and the video and the chat, you know, from Zoom momentarily when Zoom says they're prepared for me. Maybe I'll ask somebody to do it for me. I'll transfer the call to them and ask them. But also I will automatically, I will upload this call to YouTube as I always do. And I don't know what the policy is, but YouTube often generates automatically generates transcripts for many videos. I don't know if they do them for all of them, a few of them or what, but I've mysteriously discovered that many, many videos of mine just have a transcript all of a sudden like damn that was good. So I don't know if they, if they, I don't know if you, if you want to discover whether they would be great. It would really be good with that transcript is then we could go through like each part and see. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Thank you guys.