Dan Brekke, in his Apiculture blog, has an excellent quotation from Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes. The quotation is from a dissenting opinion in the case "Abrams vs. The United States" in which the US Government prosecuted the publisher of a leaflet. Holmes felt that in upholding the guilty verdict passed by the lower courts, that the publisher's right to free speech had been abridged.
Holmes writes, in part:
"...the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment."
These words resonated with me as I thought about what we are trying to accomplish with the Bee. And not just because Holmes speaks to the underlying mission of a free and open Internet -- the expression of our nation's great tradition of free speach and the freedom of the press. But also because the Bee is itself an experiment, an attempt at exploring new ways for people to communicate and collaborate about topics and ideas.
It seems that the popular habit of the day is to call evolving Internet services "beta" products. To me this implies that the product is somehow mostly complete with just a few bug fixes left to fix. No such implication should be assigned to the Bee! We are unapologetically an experiment, not a beta. We hope that you approach it as such, and help us find the "truth" that will be accepted in the "competition of the market."
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