[Gnu-arch-users] [FOSDEM substite 3] "Who Owns the Author?"

[Thomas Lord]

Since I won't be at FOSDEM I'm not preparing a talk or slides.  I am,
however, writing a brief series of short essays about the topic I
meant to speak about.

This is the third essay.  The earlier essays were:

        1. The King's English
        2. The Literature Shelf is Not Literature

This essay is quite short.   It assumes you have read the other two.


                         Who Owns the Author?

  To "become the author" of a web document means to acquire or create
  the globally unique name for a document along with the exclusive, 
  transferable, sub-dividable rights to modulate the contents of that
  document.

  On the current web, to "become the author" means to acquire a lease
  on the rights for some corner of the DNS-based URL+request document
  name-space.   This is quite expensive and leads to content which is
  not of archival quality (because such links rot).

  The challenge, then, is to devise a system of authorship -- the 
  divisible, exclusive, transferable right to modify a reference-able
  document -- to devise such a system where authorship exists in such
  abundance as to be too cheap to meter and where the documents exist
  in such a state that they can be archived and preserved regardless
  of what happens to the authorship.

  In the second essay, "The Literature Shelf is not Literature", we 
  saw that we need a good approximation of True Names for documents
  to enable archiving of web documents.

  Here, we have learned that documents must have access control (at
  least for "right to modify") and that that access control has the
  form of sub-dividable property, roughly speaking.  Selling off such
  access rights is how the current web works.  Our challenge (as far
  as authorship is concerned) is to make such rights far, far, far
  less expensive.

  Enough of my grey-beard high-level talk.   Next essay, we can start
  to get down to the technical nitty gritty.