Whenever you publish any data on the web, even simply posting to a mailing list with a public archive, you're releasing information that could be used to profile you. I could build a tool to smush together information about mailboxes from mail archives without FOAF. FOAF just makes this data, and the act of publication, more explicit. FOAF is therefore a showcase for the kind of issues that are going to be increasingly important in the future (now, even); it's not necessarily a problem for FOAF to solve, IMO.

For a long time, the right strategy for GNU was to build a basic unix replacement differentiated primarily by licensing. As software goes, the core of unix is a simple architecture, reflecting its history as a design first realized by a very small team of people.

Well, that part's done and the strategy won.

Nowadays, the proprietary competition is about databases, and productivity apps, and browsers, and middleware layers. The software we're competing against is not like unix: it isn't simple; it wasn't built by a small number number of people; it's a moving target. It isn't a tractable project to clone this proprietary software under different licensing.

If the goal is still "(a) build a free alternative to proprietary software", then a new strategy is called for: competition on _software_architecture_, not just licensing.

It *is* about how dynamic linking and binding works in a system. But how that works is intimately associated with the language design.

Then Jon goes on to amplify Patrick's point about interactive environments:

As programming increasingly relies on external services and alien environments, it becomes as much a game of exploration and discovery as of design and specification. I think dynamic languages and interactive programming environments help make us better explorers and discoverers, and I think that's only going to matter more as time goes on.

Many other sites have picked up the Wired article on MIT OpenCourseWare, MIT's effort to open source their entire curriculum.