[TeMPOraL]

In my opinion, the Web going bad has nothing to do with the technical layer. The protocols are fine.

What destroys openness is commercialization. It's hard to make a business in an open environment, because you'd be relying on the good will of people whom you provide value. So everyone tries to lock everything down and set moats. For instance, a good chunk of non-openness of the web boils down to: you can't let people access your site programmatically, because they'll develop more ergonomic/efficient UIs to it, and suddenly masses stop visiting your site and viewing ads.

Openness works best if things are given away without strings attached. So if you have an open side-web, you'll need to set up a culture or a set of rules to protect it, and be prepared that they'll kill the commercial usefulness of it.

[chrisfinazzo]

In some ways the reverse is true as well.

It reminds me of a documentary I saw years ago about the origins of Linux. At one point, I think rms was quoted as saying that even the GPL had “room for (commercial) business to be done.”

Yet I suspect most companies balked at the idea once they discovered that using the GPL made everything under it open as well - there was no competitive advantage or differentiation left once that happened.