investment from distributed innovators. Think of the early growth of the Internet and
World Wide Web in competition against the proprietary networks from IBM, Digital
Equipment Corp., and others (Abbate, 1999; Berners-Lee, 1999). Compared with a
system composed of free network protocols (rules) and cheap telephone service and
modems (modules), the proprietary systems had little to offer and were soon abandoned
(Irving Waldavsky-Berger, private communication)