[Foundation-l] Attribution survey, first results

[Sage Ross]

On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 12:14 PM, Chad <innocentkiller at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 12:05 PM, Mike Linksvayer <ml at creativecommons.org> wrote:
>> p.s. Personally, discussions of "offline" here and everywhere (say,
>> accessibility of educational materials) are absurdly myopic.
>> Consideration of offline use is about as relevant now as consideration
>> of horse stables in urban planning 100 years ago.
>>
>
> One would argue that putting in horse stables 100 years ago was a smart
> move, as people use horses. You can't know that someone's going to up
> and invent the car.
>

Furthermore, horse populations continued to grow well into the 20th
century.  Horses peaked in the US in the 1910s, and in Finland in the
1950s, and horse-drawn equipment was the core transportation
technology of World War I and played a key role even in World War II.

This is a typical pattern when a complex technology is introduced in
the presence of a simpler one; it's not a simple matter of
replacement, and old technologies (where the infrastructure is easy to
maintain) can stick around and even become more significant, even
while a complex technology spreads as well.  (See David Edgerton, The
Shock of the Old.)

I'm speculating here, but it would not surprise me at all if amount of
print publishing is still growing, and could continue to do so for a
few more decades at least.

-Sage (User:Ragesoss)