from strong and powerful property rights, pause on this point and read it
again: The most important space for innovation in our time was built upon
a platform that was free. As Alan Cox, second only to Linus Torvalds in the
Linux chain, puts it in an essay in response to Microsoft's attack on open
code values:

____ [M]ost of the great leaps of the computer age have happened despite,
____ rather than because of, [intellectual property rights (IPR)]. [B]efore the
____ Internet the proprietary network protocols divided customers, locked them
____ into providers and forced them to exchange much of their data by tape.
____ The power of the network was not unlocked by IPR. It was unlocked by
____ free and open innovation shared amongst all.[4-23]

Not strong, perfect control by proprietary vendors, but open and free pro-
tocols, as well as open and free software that ran on top of those protocols:
these produced the Net.

///\\\

This free code builds a commons. This commons in turn lowers the cost
of innovation. New projects get to draw upon this common code; every proj-
ect need not reinvent the wheel. The resource thus fuels a wide range of in-
novation that otherwise could not exist.

Free code also builds a commons in knowledge. This commons is made
possible by the nature of information. My learning how a Web page is built
does not reduce the knowledge of how a Web page is built. Knowledge, as
we've seen, is nonrivalrous; your knowing something does not lessen the
amount that I can know.

There is something particular about how free code builds this knowledge
commons. Code is performative; what it says, it does. Hence one learns
about code not just by reading the code, but also by implementing it.

Think about the code that builds the World Wide Web. Web pages are
written (primarily) in a markup language called HTML. That language is a
set of tags that mark text or graphics to be displayed on a Web page. Every
major Web browser has a function that reveals the source of the Web page
being viewed. If you see a page and want to see how it was built, you simply
"reveal source" on the page, and the Web page turns into the set of codes
that generated the page.

This feature of the World Wide Web meant that it was extremely easy for
coders to learn how to build Web pages. Most of the early learning was sim-

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