Reply to Lanier by Eric Raymond

I linked the Lanier article a few days ago. I said you would be thinking about it for a while. Eric Raymond read it too, thought about it and wrote this reply. This is fascinating stuff from some very smart fellows.

Cato Unbound » Blog Archive » Reply to Lanier: "Jaron then takes a swing at the computer-science concept of a 'file' without acknowledging a simple fact — information has to be transported. It's all very well to speak of linked digital content and seamless webs of information, but at some point, these lovely ramified entities have to be moved between the hothouse environments in which they can flourish. At which point, willy-nilly, you will find yourself packing all their manifold complexities into a block of data with a name that you can push around as a unit. In other words, a file."