In an Open-Source Society, Innovating by the Seat of Our Pants

[Commentary] The Internet isn’t really a technology. It’s a belief system, a philosophy about the effectiveness of decentralized, bottom-up innovation. And it’s a philosophy that has begun to change how we think about creativity itself.

Almost 20 years ago, I installed on my computer a tiny piece of software called MacPPP, which connected the programs running on it to the Internet. The program immediately transformed my computer from a fancy telex machine to a device running a very early version of the graphical Web. I was working in entertainment at the time, and I remember thinking that this connection was going to change everything. I left to join the first commercial Internet service provider in Japan, PSINet Japan, as its first chief executive. Our first serious challenge, oddly enough, was a battle over an obscure information-sharing computer protocol called X.25. Most of us laboring to build the new Internet preferred the less regulated and simpler Internet Protocol.