Teaching and Learning via the Network

Robust Economics for Information Age Goods

Project Number 12 - 1993

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Brad Cox, Ph.D.
Program on Social and Organizational Learning
Center for the Study of Market Processes
George Mason University
Fairfax VA 22030
(703) 993-1142 receptionist

Information Age Consulting
6603 Pelham Trace
Centreville VA 22020
(703) 968-8229
Fax: (703) 968-8798

bcox@gmu.edu

Abstract

This project addresses a key liability of electronic goods that is almost never talked about but which drastically impacts every decision of those who might provide electronic goods in lieu of tangible books and documents. Unlike the tangible goods of the manufacturing age, electronic goods can be copied in nanoseconds and transported at the speed of light. This crucial and often overlooked difference undercuts the market forces that ensure that timely relevant information (signal as distinct from noise) will be available.

My project is to address this issue. I'm organizing a coalition of major telecomputing and software industry players to apply for ARPA Defense Conversion Initiative money to deploy a pilot-scale revenue collection infrastructure for information age goods. This infrastructure uses existing infrastructures (CD disks, internet, sneakernet) for distribution. It provides a revenue collection mechanism such as to support the kind of cooperative development, based on specialized labor hierarchies, that is common in mature industrial economys, but which is almost impossible to imagine without market processes.

Since this proposal is likely to be different from what you're expecting, I've enclosed a recent article to provide more information. The article concentrates on smaller electronic objects than those I'd concentrate on in this presentation since it targets the software engineering community's interest in reusable software components instead of multimedia documents. Both, of course, are information age goods of the sort addressed by my proposal, but at radically different levels of granularity.

The project addresses the question of how to incentivize those who might create information resources in networked environments instead of in tangible form. The ease of replication and transportation of electronically mediated documents would enrich scholarship and enhance intellectual productivity, but only if the high noise to signal ratio typical of free sources like internet (as distinct from non-free sources like bookstores and libraries) is somehow addressed.

Audio-visual requirements

Overhead projector.

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Market Processes as a
New Foundation for Software Engineering

Brad Cox, Ph.D.
George Mason Program on Social and Organizational Learning

Under review for the ACM SIGSOFT '93
Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

Draft: Tue, May 18, 1993

Abstract

After a quarter-century of deploying ever more sophisticated programming languages and methodologies, the software engineering community is still the cargo cult of the information age; a primitive culture that advances primarily by acquiring faster computing technology (and the latest trendy fashions) from our advanced neighbors in the hardware engineering community.

The software crisis shows no sign of yielding to the established paradigms of software engineering and computer science. A new paradigm is needed in which we recognize that the software crisis does not originate in a deficiency in software development technology or methodology. It originates in the easy-to-replicate nature of the very goods we produce. Unlike the tangible goods of the manufacturing age, the electronic goods of the information age can be copied in nanoseconds and transported at literally the speed of light. This undercuts the market processes upon which those who manufacture tangible goods have achieved the maturity to which we aspire.

To show that a new paradigm is imaginable I'll describe superdistribution; a market mechanism for electronic goods that is now being pioneered in Japan. Instead of treating ease-of-replication as a liability to be laboriously prevented with copy protection technologies and legal or moral restrictions, superdistribution treats it as the asset upon which a new foundation for software engineering could be based. As with superconductivity, superdistribution lets information flow freely, without resistance from either copy protection or piracy. Unlike the low-tech property rights mechanisms that are widespread already (shrinkwrap software, license servers, dongles, demoware, shareware, etc), superdistribution allows producers and consumers at every level of a specialized labor hierarchy to buy and sell, not just software applications but information age goods of any granularity, just as in the advanced industrial societies we live in today.

Introduction

 
   "Of all the monsters that fill the nightmares of our folklore, 
   none terrify more than werewolves, because they transform 
   unexpectedly from the familiar into horrors. For these, one 
   seeks bullets of silver that can magically lay them to rest. 
   The familiar software project, at least as seen by the 
   nontechnical manager, has something of this character; it is 
   usually innocent and straightforward, but is capable of becoming 
   a monster of missed schedules, blown budgets, and flawed products. 
   So we hear desperate cries for a silver bullet-something to make 
   software costs drop as rapidly as computer hardware costs do."


   Fred Brooks[1]

Fred Brooks' seminal paper, 'No Silver Bullet; Essence and Accidents in Software Engineering', is profoundly discouraging to those who seek an end to the software crisis. It argues that the crisis is inevitable, arising from software's inescapable 'essence', not 'accident', a flaw in how we build it today.

This paper adopts a broader point of view from which optimistic alternatives to this bleak conclusion can be considered. It argues that solutions to the software crisis can indeed be found if we can muster the determination to build and deploy them. In the terms of this symposium's call for papers, it argues that a new foundation can indeed be erected upon which software engineering can advance beyond its present primitive status. But this new foundation will not emerge by extending the paradigm upon which software engineering is based today. It will emerge from a paradigm shift, a software industrial revolution, during which software engineering's core paradigm is overthrown and replaced.

Software engineering is currently based on a process-centric, language-oriented paradigm. Its core ideology is that solutions will emerge from continual refinements in programming languages and methodologies for fabricating software from first principles. The paradigm shift involves adopting a product-centric, object-oriented paradigm in which software is primarily assembled from pre-fabricated components. This involves far more than merely adopting new tools and methodologies. It involves transforming a primitive (unspecialized) software engineering culture into an advanced (specialized) one.

This does not mean that process-centric refinements will cease to be important. W.E. Deming's profound contributions to manufacturing[2] shows quite the opposite. Process refinements are always important, and pre- fabricated components must clearly be fabricated by someone. But software engineers too readily overlook the fact that manufacturing's recent enthusiasm for process-centric innovation was always in conjunction with, not to the exclusion of, the product-centric orientation that is taken for granted by those who build tangible goods for a living.

This product-centric viewpoint is very different from the established paradigms of software engineering and computer science. Other domains define standard products and encourage their producers to 'use the right tool for the job'. We define standard processes (programming languages and methodologies) and hope that standard products will automagically ensue. We extol the virtues of abstract data types at the expense of the concrete ones that underly the prosperity of individuals, companies and nations.

Of course, our process-centric orientation was not willfull. It is an inevitable consequence of an essential property of the electronic goods we produce; ease of replication. Unlike the tangible goods of the manufacturing age, the intangible goods of the information age can be copied in nanoseconds and transported at literally the speed of light. Although Brook's paper neglected to mention this property, it is even more essential than the four properties that he considered in detail. It undercuts the very socioeconomic mechanisms upon which other domains have achieved the maturity to which we aspire. The specialization of labor that distinguishes engineering within advanced (specialized) societies from the craftsmanship of primitive (unspecialized) ones are based on the ability to own, buy and sell goods and services that are intrinsically hard to copy.

No Silver Bullet?

The subtitle of Brooks' paper originated in the Aristotelian distinction between essence, "the difficulties inherent in the nature of software', and accident, "those difficulties that today attend its production but are not inherent". His conclusion derives from considering "the inherent properties of this irreducible essence of modern software systems: complexity, conformity, changeability, and invisibility." This list does not include the essential property that will be the subject of this paper; ease of replication. It also excludes another essential property, single-threadedness, that I'll mention only briefly in the next section.

I've argued elsewhere[3] that software development is not a mature engineering discipline but a pre-engineering craft analogous to cottage- industry manufacturing and a pre-scientific activity like Ptolemaic astronomy. Software engineering's emphasis on processes for fabricating software products, as distinct from emphasizing the products themselves, has clearly led to useful language and methodological improvements. But these initiatives have not provided, and seem increasingly unlikely to do so, a fundamental solution to the software crisis. Brooks made this very point in arguing that technology will not supply a silver bullet for the software crisis within the foreseeable future.

However silver bullets are actually common in human history. They were not new technologies but new paradigms; new exemplars for understanding a problem. Copernicus used one to eliminate the crisis in Ptolemaic astronomy. His bullet was not a technology for computing epicycles faster. It was a paradigm shift to a heliocentric model that provided a new foundation upon which a true science of astronomy could be erected.

The viewpoint of this paper originated in Thomas Kuhn's book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn argued that science does not advance incrementally, by layering new knowledge upon old. It advances discontinuously, in tumultuous periods in which established paradigms are destroyed and new ones erected. During long stagnant periods of 'normal science', scientists are not engaged in exploring new frontiers. Except for rare individuals like Copernicus, most scientists spend entire careers doing what Kuhn calls 'puzzle solving'; confirming an established paradigm by testing it against experimental observation of nature. A crisis arises if observations cannot be reconciled with the established paradigm. This may trigger a revolution in which the established paradigm is overthrown and replaced.

However, even revolutionary upheavals occur one evolutionary step at the time, so the implications of a paradigm shift may be obvious only in retrospect. Although individuals can undergo a paradigm shift in milliseconds, it takes much longer, a generation or more, for an innovation to diffuse through a society (Figure 1). This diffusion of innovation 'time constant' of a half-century or more may explain the pessimistic viewpoint of Brooks' paper, which explicitly had a much shorter time frame in mind:

   "But, as we look to the horizon of a decade hence, we see no 
   silver bullet.  There is no single development, in either 
   technology or in management technique, that by itself promises 
   even one order-of-magnitude improvement in productivity, in 
   reliability, in simplicity. In this article, I shall try to show 
   why, by examining both the nature of the software problem and 
   the properties of the bullets proposed."

Figure 1: Diffusion of a paradigm shift through a large population tends to follow a diffusion curve with a characteristic time-constant of a generation or more (50-100 years).

Thus this paper does not deny Brooks' analysis, but complements and extends it. The apparent disagreement is my assertion that a fundamental solution to the software crisis, a 'silver bullet' if you prefer, can indeed be found if we muster the determination to do so. We agree that this solution will not be a mere methodology or technology, that it will emerge over a broader horizon than 'a decade hence' and that it will involve far more than 'the bullets proposed'.

Common Thread of Control

This paper will gloss over another fundamental property that was also omitted from Brooks' list; single-threadedness. This underlies our reluctance to include other programmers' objects in our applications. Any object can endanger all other objects if it misuses the machine's control thread. This control thread is a shared global resource that software engineers, unlike other engineers, must continually share and protect against misuse. This raises a perpetual obstacle to reusing code the way advanced engineering domains reuse the components of other members of their society.

However, although this obstacle clearly makes the software engineer's job harder, techniques like exception handling, multi-tasking, distributed processing and trellis architectures[4] already exist that are capable of controling part of the resulting complexity. I've glossed over this difference, not because it is unimportant, but because the lack of robust market mechanisms is even more essential. Ease of replication inhibits us from using the specialization of labor that mature engineering domains rely on to control complexity by distributing it across time and space by encapsulating it within each other's products.

Chicken versus Egg

These two quotations exemplify why I say software engineering is based on a process-centric paradigm to the exclusion of a product-centric focus:

• "Process improvement is central to the Software Productivity Consortium's long-term mission to forge significant advances in software engineering. In this view, process is the integrating "glue" with which distinct methods and tools can be implemented to address the specific needs of member companies." SPC Quarterly Newsletter

• "The recently-formed ANSI C++ committee, X3J16, has the task of standardizing the C++ language. Part of this is to specify zero or more standard libraries. Which libraries become part of the standard is still an open question, and will not be settled soon. So for the next year or two, you are on your own." Internet NetNews Article

The relationship between process and product is an intimate one, so much so that taking the pro-product rhetoric with which I opened this topic to its logical extreme would be as bad as the pro-process orientation of these quotations.

Kuhn's paradigm shift rhetoric has served its purpose by exposing the process-centric orientation of these quotes. So from here on I'll dispense with this rhetoric and concentrate on avoiding the opposing horn of the chicken versus egg dilemma. An exclusively product-centric paradigm is clearly just as indefensible as an exclusively process- centric one. Neither process nor product comes first since process is to product as chickens are to eggs (and vice versa).

Is Software Engineering?

Now let's consider the kinds of human organizations that can be said to do 'engineering'. Since my purpose is not to find a narrow (exclusive) definition of this term that its diverse claimants might agree on, I shall adopt an inclusive definition so broad that it includes almost everything. By 'engineering' in this inclusive sense, I'll include everyone who is engaged in transforming incoming products (raw materials) to produce new products. This inclusive definition will help to focus attention on specialization of labor as the key difference between primitive (non-specialized) and advanced (specialized) societies.

Thus engineering involves acquiring raw materials from nature or from other members of a society and transforming them into higher-level products for others to acquire. In an advanced society, this goes on at every level of a deep hierarchy of producers and consumers. For example, mining is an engineering process in which incoming products are acquired from nature and transformed into ore. Refining is an engineering process in which ore is purchased from miners and transformed into refined metals. Computer manufacturing is an engineering process in which silicon chips are purchased from a market in electronic components and transformed into higher-level electronic products.

By my inclusive definition, an aborigine basket-maker who cuts reeds on the river bank to weave into baskets is an engineer of the primitive variety that customary definitions of this term would exclude as 'mere' craftsmanship. On the other hand, software end-users buy shrink-wrap software from a software market and assemble them to make a personalized desktop publishing solution. This is also engineering by my inclusive definition, but of the advanced variety that software engineers would exclude by arbitrarily adopting a new definition that excludes non- programming end-users.

Notice that the conventional definition of software engineering includes the primitive variety of engineering that hardware engineers exclude as mere craftsmanship. And it excludes the advanced variety that hardware engineers would enthusiastically endorse.

Consider a financial analyst who assembles a desktop publishing engine from a generic personal computer by buying shrink-wrapped word processors and spreadsheets, and then uses this engine to process a Dow Jones stock quotation data-feed to produce financial articles for publication. Isn't this analyst just as much engaged in advanced engineering as a refinery engineer who builds a refinery to process petroleum? Isn't a Smalltalk programmer who assembles classes from a class library to create such an application doing engineering in an equally advanced sense of the term, although at several levels lower in a specialized labor hierarchy? And isn't a C++ programmer who builds this same application out of components that he fabricated solely for the project on hand engaged in the primitive kind of engineering, no different from the aborigine basket-weaver's hand-craftsmanship?

Paradoxically, we've defined software engineering to mean the unspecialized organization of primitive societies. We've perversely excluded the advanced style of engineering that is widespread within the non- programming end-user community.

Of course, this perverse definition was neither capricious nor malicious. It was a consequence of the fact that electronic products are so ephemeral that it has never been obvious how to treat them as 'products' in the sense that ore, metals, and silicon chips are products that can be robustly bought and sold by the copy. The key to resolving the software crisis hinges on resolving this long-standing matter of economics, which is to say human motivation. It is not a matter of computer technology except insofar as technology may play a part in its solution.

Information Age Economics

Electronic goods are not found in nature. They are entirely produced by people. Reusable software components can only be produced by the individual who uses them as in primitive unspecialized societies, or by other members of the society as in the advanced industrial societies we're so familiar with today.

Clearly intangible electronic goods like shrink-wrap applications, stock price quotations, and Smalltalk classes are very different from tangible goods like baskets, reeds, oil refinery machinery, and personal computer hardware. Although the differences are significant from a techno-centric perspective, they are immaterial from the perspective of human motivation. Those who produce electronic goods and services realize that their production will consume, capital, labor and knowledge just as tangible goods do[5]. Reasonable people don't make such investments in the absence of a robust mechanism capable of assuring a positive return on their investment.

Once a robust incentive structure is provided, the self-organizing systems we call markets can exist. Market processes organize and coordinate the distributed decision-making of independent self- interested individuals by what the economist, Adam Smith, called 'The Invisible Hand'. Markets eliminate complexity by dispersing it across time and space, encapsulating it within goods produced by others.

Market Mechanisms

The market mechanism for the tangible goods of the manufacturing age didn't require any particular attention. The hard-to-copy nature of tangible goods made the traditional pay-per-copy mechanism the natural choice. But the market mechanism is very much an issue for information age goods that can be copied in nanoseconds and transported at literally the speed of light. This so thoroughly undercuts the pay-per-copy mechanism of traditional markets that there is considerable dispute as to whether a robust supply of pre-fabricated information age goods is even possible.

This dispute is generally engaged in under the name 'Intellectual Property', an unfortunate term that lumps property that resides externally, on computers and networks, with true intellectual property which resides internally, in the mind. There is considerable room for dispute as to whether true intellectual property can or even should be 'protected'. However electronic property is not the same matter because it does not reside in the mind. It resides externally, on computers and networks, where it is accessible to technological intervention and metering.

A common argument that is often advanced during any consideration of robust market mechanisms for software is that software is so uniquely malleable that any protection scheme can be subverted. However the perpetual race between bank vaults and safe-cracking technology, or between tank armor and anti-tank missile technology shows that the same is true of tangible goods. Robust markets demonstrably exist in shopping malls, even though the obstacles to shoplifting are almost as negligible as the barriers to software piracy in computers. There may be a difference in degree for software, but not in kind. The conflict between those who wish to protect versus those who wish to steal is always with us.

These examples show that absolute protection is neither possible or necessary. All that is necessary is that the costs and risks to those who would subvert the protection be greater than the value of the goods thus acquired. The next section will show that this weaker condition is achievable by relying on the same combination of technological, social, moral and punitive sanctions upon which markets have relied since antiquity.

Superdistribution[6]

Existing copyright law distinguishes between copyright (the right to copy or distribute) and useright (the right to 'perform', or to use a copy once obtained). These laws were stringently tested in court a century ago as the music publishers came to terms with broadcast technologies such as radio and TV.

In the eyes of the law, when we buy a record or CD disk we're actually purchasing a bundle of rights with respect to the electronic property contained on that medium. The individual rights in this bundle were established in the U.S. Constitution. Subsequent case law has upheld the property owner's right to bundle these rights for sale in any combination they please. So when Joe Sixpack buys a record at the store, he actually buys a rights bundle that includes ownership of a physical medium along with a limited useright that only allows use of the music on that medium for personal enjoyment. Large television and radio companies buy an entirely different bundle of rights. They often have the same media (whose only difference is a 'not for resale' sticker on the cover) thrust upon them by publishing companies for free in expectation of substantial fees for the useright to play the music on the air. These fees are administered by ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) and BMI (Broadcast Musicians Institute) by monitoring how often each record is broadcast to how large a listening audience.

Superdistribution analogizes a personal computer to a broadcasting station whose 'audience' consists of a single 'listener'. Work on superdistribution has been underway since 1987. It was pioneered by Dr. Ryoichi Mori who heads JEIDA (Japan Electronics Industry Development Association), an industry-wide consortium of telecomputing companies. He calls his approach superdistribution because, like superconductivity, it lets information flow freely, without resistance from copy protection and piracy[7].

Superdistribution is based on the following observation. Electronic objects differ from tangible objects by being fundamentally unable to monitor their copying but trivially able to monitor their use. For example, it is easy to make software count how many times it has been invoked, but hard to make it count how many times it has been copied. So why not build an information age market economy around this difference between manufacturing age and information age goods? If revenue collection were based on monitoring the use of software inside a computer, vendors could dispense with copy protection altogether. They could distribute electronic objects for free in expectation of a usage-based revenue stream.

The premise of this approach is that copy protection is exactly the wrong idea for intangible, easily copied goods such as software. Superdistribution treats ease of replication as an asset instead of a liability. It actively encourage free distribution of information age goods via any distribution mechanism you please. It encourages users to download superdistribution software from networks, to give it away to their friends, or to send it as junk mail to people they've never met.

This generosity is possible because the software is actually 'meterware'. It has strings attached that decouple revenue collection from however the software was distributed. Superdistribution software contains embedded instructions that make it useless except on machines that are equipped for this new kind of revenue collection.

The computers that can run superdistribution software are otherwise quite ordinary. In particular, they run ordinary pay-by-copy software just fine. They just have additional capabilities that only superdistribution software uses. In Mori's prototype, these extra services are provided by a silicon chip that plugs into a Macintosh coprocessor slot. Electronic objects (not just applications, but objects of every granularity) that are intended for superdistribution invoke this hardware to ensure that the revenue collection hardware is present, that prior usage reports have been uploaded, and that prior usage fees have been paid.

The hardware is surprisingly uncomplicated (the main complexities are tamper- proofing, not base functionality), far less complicated than hardware that the computer industry has been routinely building for decades. The hardware merely provides several instructions that must be present before superdistribution software can run. These instructions count how many times they have been invoked by the software, storing the resulting usage information temporarily in a tamper-proof persistent RAM. Periodically (say monthly) this usage information is uploaded to an administrative organization for billing, using encryption technology to discourage tampering and to protect the secrecy of the metered information.

The end-user receives a monthly bill for their usage of each top-level component. These payments are credited to each component's owner in proportion to usage. The owners' accounts are then debited according to their applications' usage of sub-components. These payments are credited to the sub-components' owners, again in proportion to usage. In other words, the end-user's payments are recursively distributed through the producer-consumer hierarchy. The distribution is governed by usage metering information collected from each end-user's machine, plus usage pricing data provided to the administrative organization by each component vendor.

Since communication is infrequent and involves only a small amount of metering information, the communication channel could be as simple as a modem that autodials a hardwired 800 number each month. Many other solutions are viable, such as flash cards or even floppy disks to be mailed back and forth each month in the mails.

Technical Implications

A change in the socioeconomics of computing has radical implications on the underlying technology of telecomputing.

For example, present-day notions of software property rights emerged out of ideologies that where established during the transition from timeshared to personal computing. Each individual works at a personal computer, loosely connected, if at all, to other individuals' computers by a network. Each computer provides an operating system that allows the individual to manage a disk on which the individual's electronic property resides. This architecture evolved from the assumption that 'owning' electronic property means having a copy of it. This imposes fundamental restrictions to exchange of goods across different levels of a specialized labor hierarchy.

Once property rights are reconceived in terms of usage instead of acquisition of copies, fundamentally new operating system architectures become possible. With superdistribution, property exists 'out there on the network'. The hard drive is no longer interesting; a place where the user manages personal property. The hard drive disappears and becomes just part of the plumbing; a cache that the operating system manages to avoid having to reacquire bytes that have been used recently and are likely to be needed again soon.

Consider an author who wishes to distribute (with superdistribution, even to sell) a multimedia document that cannot be handled as a simple text file. Without superdistribution, the author's market is confined to those who have already purchased a program capable of displaying this document. The same occurs at each lower level of the producer/consumer hierarchy. The market of a programmer who wishes to sell a reusable software component is restricted to those who have already purchased the components and tools upon which the software component relies.

With superdistribution, the potential market for my hypothetical author's multimedia document becomes universal. The document's market is no longer restricted to those who own a program capable of reading the document because this program will be acquired by the document's customers' operating systems as if it were a part of the document. Just as the owner of the document accrues revenue from those who read the document, the owner of the reader program will accrue revenue from the document owner as the 'user' of the reader program. And so forth for the reusable software comonents that the latter may have used in constructing the program.

The user's operating system acquires subcomponents of the document, such as the reader program and any sub-components it relies on, from the hard drive's cache, automatically loading it as needed from the network. The operating system can do this automatically and transparently because loading software involves no financial commitments when revenue is based on usage instead of acquisition of copies.

Conclusion

Superdistribution addresses the perennial implicit question of those who might potentially provide the smaller-granularity reusable software components upon which an advanced software engineering culture could be founded; "Where do software components come from? Why should I bother to provide them? Why should I engage in such gritty activities as testing and documenting reusable software components sufficiently that others might use them? What is in it for me?"

Whereas software's ease of replication is a liability today (by disincentivizing those who would provide it), superdistribution turns this liability into an asset by allowing information age goods to be distributed for free. Whereas software vendors must spend heavily to overcome software's invisibility, superdistribution thrusts software out into the world to serve as its own advertisement. Whereas the personal computer revolution isolates individuals inside a standalone personal computer, superdistribution establishes a cooperative/competitive community around an information age market economy.

By decoupling revenue collection from acquisition of copies, hard drives and computers can disappear and become just part of the plumbing that conveys information age goods between producers and consumers. Computers and telecommunications links become invisible; a transparent window through which individuals can communicate, cooperate, coordinate and compete as members of an advanced socioeconomic community.

   Brad Cox, Ph.D.
   Information Age Consulting
   6603 Pelham Trace; Centreville VA 22020
   703 968 8229 Voice 703 968 8798 Fax


   George Mason University
   Center for the Study of Market Processes
   Program on Social and Organizational Learning
   10310 Main Street #166; Fairfax VA 22030
   703 993 1142 reception; 703 934 1578 fax
   bcox@gmu.edu

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[1] Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. No Silver Bullet; Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering. Computer Magazine April 1987; First published in Information Processing 1986, ISBN No. 0444-7077-3, H. J. Kugler, ed., Elsevia Science Publishers B.V. (North-Holland) IFIP 1986.

[2] W.E. Deming. Out of the Crisis; Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Advanced Engineering Study; Cambridge, Mass; 1986.

[3] Brad Cox. Planning the Software Industrial Revolution. IEEE Software November 1990.

[4] David Gelernter. Mirror Worlds. Oxford University Press; 1992.

[5] Freidrich Hayek. The Use of Knowledge in Society. American Economic Review, XXXV, No. 4; Sept 1945, 519-30.

[6] This section was adapted from a editorial in the June 1992 issue of the Journal of Object-oriented Programming, "What if there is a silver bullet and the competition builds it first?". The editorial was subsequently republished in the October 1992 issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal. The author retained copyright for this material.

[7] Ryoichi Mori and Masaji Kawahara Superdistribution: The Concept and the Architecture. Transactions of The IEICE Vol E-73 #7 July l990; Special Issue on Cryptography and Information Security.

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