[ih] Karl's post from Friday: Re: Interop as part of Internet History

[John Gilmore]

dave walden wrote:
> And the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing would surely like to see submission of a an anecdote (see https://annals-extras.org/anecdotes/ and https://annals-extras.org/anecdotes/writing/ ) or a longer piece submitted to the peer review process ( see https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/an and https://www.computer.org/publications/author-resources/peer-review/magazines )

Why would any veteran of the early Internet ever submit their historical
reminisces to a group that locks the information up behind a paywall for
its own profit?

Click through Dave's links above to notice "Log in to access my
content"!!!  They'll require you to assign your copyright to them, too,
but the "invitation to write for them" doesn't tell you that.

Don't feed the IEEE or the ACM that bites you.

Don't volunteer for their program committees or to be an editor, author
or reviewer.  They suck and you shouldn't suck.  Put your energy and
your time into something that feeds your community, not parasitizes it.
Those orgs always have the option to make their information free -- they
make a deliberate choice every day to lock it up.

Part of what made the Internet successful (besides Interop!) was that
anybody could download, read, share, spread -- and implement -- the
specs for the protocols that it ran on.  Without subscriptions,
payments, royalties, copyrights, patents, transcribing things manually
from printed paper, etc.  Freedom.  What a concept.  Could catch on!

I actually did order a few IEEE standards (through their commercial
provider, what was it called?  Global Technical Information?), because I
had to implement them for a job.  They cost like $50 for a 20-page
pamphlet, took weeks to get, and were written to be incomprehensible.
Whereas the RFCs were open, accessible, and (in the early days with Jon
Postel editing) written to be understood.

If someone from this list would like to start an open-access academic
journal that covers the same subject matter, I would be very happy to
recommend you to a likely source of startup funding for it.  The best
way to destroy bloodsucking copyright monopolies is to out-compete them.

	John Gilmore
	
PS: Carl Malamud's Public.Resource.org is currently in federal court,
defending itself (with EFF.org's help) to be able to publish copies of
copyrighted standards, like building codes, that have become required by
incorporation into state law.  The standards orgs think they can have it
both ways -- they write the rules that everyone is required by law to
follow, but you can't read them unless you pay their monopoly price for
the privilege!  That team just won a Supreme Court case in April,
affirming that states can't copyright their laws (Georgia tried).
Support either or both orgs if you value open societies and oppose
secret laws and proprietary standards.  See:

  https://law.resource.org/
  https://www.eff.org/cases/publicresource-freeingthelaw
  https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/04/supreme-court-affirms-no-one-owns-law