closed source : dark ages :: open source : enlightenment

while reading

    Royal Society: rent-seeking is more important than science
    http://www.boingboing.net/2005/11/25/royal_society_rentse.html

this paragraph struck a chord with me:

> The five-hundred-year Dark Ages were a period when alchemists
> labored in secret. Every alchemist jealously guarded his
> research outcomes, so whenever an alchemist discovered the hard
> way that drinking mercury was poison, that knowledge died with
> him (literally). The Enlightenment accomplished real alchemy:
> converting research into knowledge through the application of
> full disclosure. Once alchemists began to share their research
> outcomes, they became true scientists, and the hundred years
> that followed made more progress than the half-millennium that
> preceded it.

-- 
Gerald Oskoboiny <gerald@impressive.net>
http://impressive.net/people/gerald/

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