In case you don't get it

Here's a quote from the Harvard University Press review of the 2004 Winner of the Professional/Scholarly Publishing Annual Award Competition, Computer and Information Science: Steven Weber's highly acclaimed book, The Success of Open Source.

Traditionally, intellectual property law has allowed companies to control knowledge and has guarded the rights of the innovator, at the expense of industry-wide cooperation. In turn, engineers of new software code are richly rewarded; but, as Weber shows, in spite of the conventional wisdom that innovation is driven by the promise of individual and corporate wealth, ensuring the free distribution of code among computer programmers can empower a more effective process for building intellectual products. In the case of Open Source, independent programmers--sometimes hundreds or thousands of them--make unpaid contributions to software that develops organically, through trial and error.

So you are saying WTF. I know you are. Why do I quote this? Because some people, especially corporate lawyers do not get it about open source. Legal and Open communities have it out all the time. Isn't it about time that intellectual property law is transformed to match the needs of the new millineum? I don't know exactly what needs to be done, but I do know that people need to talk.

End of sermon.