7 Tales of Bureaucracy
standards, that if code is law then it must surely follow that law is code—and if that is the case, then the only way that makes sense to release this code has to be open source.
—Bureaucracy № 2—
For the rest of my story today, I turn from Geneva back to the United States.
In 1993, I had graduated from print to the wonderful world of multimedia, which meant mostly 8-bit GIF files. The blinky tag had not even been invented yet.
Most of us running network ops were using FTP, email, and perhaps gopher and Archie. With those tools, I was running an Internet radio station called Internet Talk Radio. The flagship program was Geek of the Week, which most people retrieved by launching an overnight FTP job and then—assuming the sound card was properly installed—listened to the sound file on their workstations.
Not everybody had FTP, and one listener used the MCI Mail FTP gateway, which broke the 30-megabyte sound files up into several hundred mail messages. When all the messages arrived, he reassembled them and curled up to his workstation for his episode of Geek of the Week.
We did a lot of "the future is here" Internet demos in those days, and after giving one in Congress, I was called aside by the staff of Congressman Edward Markey, and they showed me a letter from a Nader's Raider named Jamie Love, saying that the Securities and Exchange Commission database of public filings of corporations—known as EDGAR for the Electronic Data Gathering and
