And the dream has fueled a succession of grand collaborative projects, cathedrals of knowledge built without any intention of profiting from the creation, from the virtual communities of the nineties to Linux to Wikipedia to the Creative Commons. It’s found in the very idea of open-source software. Such notions of sharing were once idealistic gestures and the reveries of shaggy inventors, but they have become so much the norm that they have been embraced by capitalism. The business plans of the most spectacularly successful firms in history, Google and Facebook, are all about wiring the world
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