[OT] Re: Intellectual Property in Network Design

[William Waites <wwaites () tardis ed ac uk>]

On Fri, 13 Feb 2015 11:43:14 +1100, Ahad Aboss <ahad () telcoinabox com> said:

    > In a sense, you are an artist as network architecture
    > is an art in itself.  It involves interaction with time,
    > processes, people and things or an intersection between all.

This Friday's off-topic post for NANOG:

Doing art is creative practice directed to uncover something new and
not pre-conceived.  Successful acts of art produce something that not
only wasn't there before but that nobody thought could be there. The
art is the change in thinking that results. Whatever else is left over
is residue.

An engineer or architect in the usual setting, no matter how skilled,
is not doing art because the whole activity is pre-conceived. Even a
clean and elegant design is not usually intended to show beautiful
connections between ideas the same way poetry or mathematics
might. Hiring an engineer for this purpose almost never happens in
industry. Rather the purpose is to make a thing that does what it is
intended to do. It is craft, or second-order residue. Useful, possibly
difficult, but not art.

Some people want to claim ownership of a recipe for predictably
creating residue of a certain kind. An artist knows that this is not
good for doing art because nothing new can come from it. If they are
committed to their practice, they will not seek to prevent others from
using an old recipe. Why would they? They have already moved on.

Some older thoughts on the topic: http://archive.groovy.net/syntac/

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