The commercial infrastructure we call "the commons" depends on something deeper Hollywood still doesn't understand. Linux and the Net are both part of it. Let's call it "innerstructure."
Look up "infrastructure" on Google and (as of today) you'll get 6,830,000 search results. The top result points to the National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC), the mission of which is "to serve as the U.S. government's focal point for threat assessment, warning, investigation, and response for threats or attacks against our critical infrastructures. These infrastructures, which include telecommunications, energy, banking and finance, water systems, government operations, and emergency services, are the foundation upon which our industrialized society is based".
The three top (most recent) "What's New" bulletins pertain to software. There's a May 6, 2002 CyberNotes that runs down a long "summary of software vulnerabilities" that that include all kinds of stuff: GNU, Apache, The April 26 Alert was "Propagation of the W32/Klez.h@mm Worm and Variants". The March 11 Alert was "Multiple Remote Vulnerabilities in Microsoft's Internet Information Services (IIS)".
Read down the list of stuff on both the Google Search and NIPC pages, and you get the impression that an awful lot of what we call "infrastructure" consists of operating systems and the software that runs on them.
But generally speaking, "infrastructure" refers to the stuff that holds civilization together: power production and distribution systems, dams and water systems, sewage collection, piping and processing, roads and bridges, airports and public transportation systems -- stuff on which we all have a terribly high level of dependency.
This kind of appears to be the product of combined public and private effort. For example, most airports are owned by public entities, while most airlines are owned by businesses. Those businesses operate not only in what we politely call "the regulatory environment," but in a civilized world that very much depends on them for its persistence.
Which leads me to wonder what, say, IBM is up to when it aggressively associates its brand with the word "infrastructure":
IBM's advertising and promotional materials speak pro forma PR jive, such as "the information technology (IT) infrastructure of e-business has become a mission critical component of the global enterprise." But if you look at the promotional pattern, it becomes clear that the company is associating the i-word with well-established heavy-duty products like Tivoli and new services that examine a customer's own "IT infrastructure."
This all has the effect of further locating "infrastructure" above the deeper stuff that's purely public. It's commercial stuff.
But what about the Net, and the highly public protocols and technologies that make it possible? This stuff is more like geology than just the "commons" that sits on top of it. What do we call this deeper stuff?
In the past I've suggested calling it "interstructure," to make it work in a literal way with "Internet", as well as to distinguish it from "infrastructure". But that only works if we think of the Net as something inclusive -- interstructural -- rather than something supportive.
If we go back to the Latin, infra means within and inter means between. But we need something that means underneath, but in a way that refers to a whole world that surrounds it. "Substructure" isn't strong or fundamental enough. It sounds too easy to make and own. What we want is something as central and un-ownable as the core of the Earth.
An answer came to me while I was flying into Minneapolis last Wednesday to give a keynote on Thursday titled "Why Linux is still the best OS for business", at the Strictly Business Expo there. I was looking for a way to characterize Linux that would not reduce it to yet another "component" or "strategy" or "business model." I wanted to make clear that Linux, like the Internet, supports the stuff we call "infrastructure" in the same deep way that geology supports roads, bridges, reservoirs and power lines. And that Linux is no less free and open than the Internet.
The word that came to me was innerstructure.
This not only labels the class of stuff Linux occupies (along with the Net), but makes sense of what companies like IBM, Apple and HP are doing with their open source strategies. Yes, they are contributing to the community and its body of open source code. But they are also contributing mass and substance to the world we build stuff on -- and the raw materials we use to build infrastructure.
Linux is more than rocks and trees that can be hewn into foundations and walls. It's in the bedrock underneath everything we build on the Net. So are all the GNU tools, BSD and everything else that seems to have formed in computing's natural environment.
Anyway, that's where my thinking was going while the plane bounced and hopped through baby thunderclouds as it approached the airport.
Once I was on the ground and jacked into the Net, I looked for ways to help expand the thinking here. As I've done before, I went to Stewart Brand's "Layers of time" diagram of civilization at the Long Now Foundation site:
That diagram sandwiches "infrastructure" between governance (which regulates it), and commerce (which depends on it). This also makes sense out of what I said earlier about how infrastructure involves both government and business:
But innerstructure is deeper than that. Like the core of the Earth, it's something nobody can own and everybody can use. Like the Earth's fertile surface, it derives much of its fertility from the life it supports. In includes all the layers from infrastructure on down to nature:
So when companies like IBM, Apple and HP get involved with open source development communities, and contribute code to Linux, Apache, BSD, GCC or anything else, they are not just building infrastructure. They are enlarging the good nature of the computing innerstructure on which we all depend.
This concept should also help make sense out of the current battle between Silicon Valley and Hollywood.
Jack Valenti of the MPAA, Michael Eisner of Disney and Hillary Rosen of the RIAA all sit up at the commerce and fashion layers of civilization and call on government to regulate the Net's infrastructure. They see that infrastructure entirely in terms of commerce and governance. Technologists, and friends of technology such as Lawrence Lessig, who deeply understand the Net and its role in civilization, see the commons as public infrastructure that sits on Internet innerstructure.
So what's happening here isn't a clash of cultures. It's the failure of one culture to understand the deeper nature of technologies we all share -- ones whose purposes are entirely and unselfishly supportive, and that have no secrets. And it's the job of the other culture to make that nature clear.
I don't know if I've done that here (or when I talked about it last Thurdsay in Minneapolis), but that's what I've tried to do.
A datapoint: as of today, Google finds just 92 pages on the Web with the word "innerstructure". It has no common meaning yet. That means we're in a good postition to give it one.
Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal. His opinions are his own.