Yesterday I wrote a piece that summed up Twitter as an entrepreneurial project. "It would have been better if the founders had made less money, and opened the door for lots of competition right from the start. That's the philosophy of the web. Instead they captured the web, amputated all its good features, and locked it in the trunk and then cut off its air supply. That was inevitable given the path they went down. Yes they changed the world, and in turn are creating a lot of misery." If anyone writes the history of tech in Silicon Valley in the early part of the 21st century, I hope they focus on the damage done, not just the money made. Don't glorify the fortune, it's our freedom that's paid for it. And the amazing thing people will discover if they look closely is that the open technology cost very little to develop, so you don't need the backing of VCs to create open systems, you just have to be right at the right time and have the ability, focus and ambition to create enough base technology to bootstrap the idea.#