Today’s blog subject is the ascendancy of ascendancy. Or put another way: At the end of the day, it’s still just the end of the day.

Today, therefore, I’m writing about open-source. When you reach the age of 40 (as evidently I’ve now done), you realize the difference between cynicism and wisdom. While old-timers shake their heads and say that most things don’t actually change, one thing that has actually changed is the interactivity of community via the internet.

I don’t know if things used to be good or bad, but one good thing coming out of the slow-cooking movement might just be this: People are sharing. (And none too late!!)

This is simply revolutionary. We are taught from the womb outward to play well with others and treat people with dignity and respect. In school these days, kids play games where “everybody’s a winner”. They are encouraged to share. I don’t really care about the communist implications of all of this, but I’ve just always found it an amusing disservice schools do for preparing their young charges for the harshness of the world ahead.

But that view of things is so 1990s, and that would be cynical. Indeed, with age does come wisdom. In small ways, the open-source “user innovation” movement is finally taking hold; and, I suspect, building on the fertile ground irrigated by years of “everybody’s a winner” indoctrination in our culture.

I’m a copyright lawyer, which I’ve always taken to mean that I’m here to protect you from connivers, upstarts, charlatans, sharks and moochers trying to make money on the back of your hard work. Kind of a grim view of the world, really.

Copyright has not been abandoned at all in the age of digital technology and new media. Quite the opposite, really, as the rise of Creative Commons and the explosion of open-source software development demonstrate. But while technology has been pushing and pushing the limits of what copyright can protect (see the National Geographic CD-ROM cases and the Supreme Court’s 2005 decision in the Grokster file-sharing case), the focus still remains so much on the technology – not the changes in the culture and philosophy making the technology so powerful.

Creative Commons came along years ago to suggest – in a provocative way – that copyright is a fluid cultural concept. Open-source software (e.g. GNU public licenses) promotes the idea that my contribution really is only the incremental contribution to the advancement of knowledge. It does not prevent me from monetizing my intellectual capital, but it does set up incentives for me to allow others to do so as well based on their own incremental contributions.

The New York Times today reported on how the Ford Model T, celebrating its 100th birthday this year, may have been an early example of “user innovation” when it spawned “tractors, pickup trucks, paddy wagons, mobile lumber mills and power plants for milling grain. An itinerant preacher converted his into a four-wheeled chapel” – all built on the Model T platform.

We started our Media Future Now group last summer to ferment the ascendancy of knowledge about new content, media, business and technology. Our members have important and challenging day jobs where they try to succeed for themselves and their businesses in commercial and competitive ways. Yet, open-source and open dialogue, in a business community, serve to advance the accumulation and sharing of knowledge, out of which individual inspiration and commercial advance are derived.

We are hopeful that the theory behind our group’s “idea exchange” will benefit the private interests of our members as well as the public interests of a community of interests. The very curious and encouraging thing to us is to recognize – as does today’s Model T celebration – that these are not new concepts.

Go try to build your own paddy wagon from scratch.