They say that the best things in life are free. Well, lucky for us, the Internet's greatest power is its ability to liberate information. When information is free, more people can obtain it, absorb it, and contribute to it. When I speak of being "free," I don't just mean free of cost, but also "free" to copy and manipulate.
Free things also make great competition.
In the fall of 1994, I heard about this new thing with a rather stupid name in my opinion: the World Wide Web. I downloaded a program called Mosaic (version .9) and clicked away. I was amazed. At that time, the web was so new that there was only a few places to go that were of any interest, it was slow, and your computer would crash every few minutes-but boy was it exciting.
The bugs were worked out in Mosaic and the source code was licensed to a handful of companies, including a start-up company called Mosaic Communications, which eventually changed its name to match the name of their premier product, Netscape Navigator.
Netscape's Navigator software isn't free. Theoretically, it's $49 a pop, but you can download the software for free. The $49 doesn't give you much but a clear conscience: a shiny new disk with the same browser you already have on your hard drive. You don't even get any printed documentation. You're waived of any guilt if you use the software at a school or non-profit organization: it's free for you. Thanks, guys.
Another slightly larger company also licensed the Mosaic code: Microsoft. Now the competition is fierce. Microsoft is giving away its web browser, called Internet Explorer, for free to everyone. It is quickly catching up on features that previously offered only by Netscape.
Both companies are adding features that make pages viewed with their browser better, but incompatible with other browsers. Netscape (and soon Microsoft) support plug-ins, little programs that run inside your browser and extend it to do new things. There are plug-ins for virtual reality worlds, to make pages talk, to play music, movies, or sounds, and to display every obscure file format including my favorite, Adobe's Portable Document Format. Of course, you can't use these unless you download each one individually and install it.
Oh yeah, freedom creates something else: chaos.
If Darwin was correct, the freedom to compete will ultimately result in the survival of the fittest. In other words, out of chaos, the best will win.
Well, supposedly. Take the Macintosh. It is indisputably a better computer than any other platform for at least the last 10 years, yet today less than 10 percent of the world's computers are Apple's. Given, that's a big number when put on a global scale, but on an evolutionary scale, the Macintosh is only about as popular as Darwin's Galapagos turtles.
Java, a programming language originally designed for running cars and toasters, has become the most exciting thing on the web today. What makes Java so revolutionary is that programs you write in it will run on any kind of computer. There's no such thing as a PC versus a Mac version of Java program. Of course, it's free too.
For months people waited to have browsers that would run Java well and programmers boned up on how to write it. Finally, Netscape made Java work in their browser and the world was ready to run the revolution. The first application of this remarkable new technology? Scrolling lines of advertisements. Somehow I doubt this was what the creators of Java had in mind. I guess we'll just have to wait for new ideas and watch Java change and evolve on the net.
People are just now talking about software on the net that goes out, finds somewhere to "live", reproduces, and evolves. They hope that this will allow software to develop more quickly according to what people like. For now, it's up to us to move the software evolution along.
Whether the motivation is the almighty buck, earning pole position in a new media world, or software's will to survive, the net is definitely changing quickly.
Things move so fast on the net that people have defined an "Internet Month" as one calendar week. But even if the net evolves at that rate, we won't see much. Remember that it took a couple of million years for man to figure out that holes in rocks don't make very nice homes.
Will the best of the Internet evolve to the top of the Internet food chain? Will freedom allow the smartest and best species to become the standard for all goodness? Ask the dolphins.