At the other extreme, as we see from Craig Mundie's speech , Microsoft has fixed and developed ideas about intellectual property and its role in prosperities that arise from proprietary software development and licensing. Yet in the bazaar we call the Net, the latter operates in the context of the former, because the most infrastructural software has the least influence by ownership. It is literally built to share . The interstructure between us all only began to become manifest with the Net and the Web. There are countless services, countless protocols, countless relationships between structural forms of software that are barely conceived, much less built.
Instant messaging is a perfect example.
Jabber is starting to change that perception, but we still have a long way to go. File, management, directory and security services are even farther away. There's nothing like Apache, Sendmail or Jabber anywhere among them. This isn't a question at all for the free software and open source communities. It's a prima facie imperative.