Mr. Raymond’s immediate subject was software, but his essay spoke for the age. It was a moment when democracy seemed on the march worldwide, when “the end of history” had been declared by Francis Fukuyama, when new tools called Web logs, or blogs, promised to empower the little guy. In that moment, as went the open-source technology, so went the world.

But today, in this moment of autocrat envy, as goes the world, so goes the technology.

Unfettered openness has been a near theology not merely for boosters of democracy; it is also the defining ethos of the Internet. But here, too, are signs of pushback and a new questioning among technophiles about the limits of openness.

In a recent essay in The New Republic, the liberal legal scholar Lawrence Lessig lashed out at “the tyranny of transparency,” criticizing a movement for digitally enabled openness in government that is popular with his liberal colleagues and at present holds much sway in Washington. But Mr. Lessig argued that efforts to require legislators to post schedules online and to map votes against campaign donations, to cite two examples, can leave “a suggestion of a sin” and deprive legislators of breathing room to conduct their work, while eroding the public trust that disclosure was meant to bolster.

At the same time, the just-ask-the-crowd fervor of recent years — reflected in the ascendancy of blogs, citizen journalism, the “Idol” contest votes, Wikipedia, open-source software — appears to be cooling.

The extraordinary success of Apple’s App Store — the tightly controlled and very-non-open-source software platform for the iPhone and iPad — has compelled some openness evangelists to reconsider. Meanwhile, it has become clear that the revolution in user-generated content has not been very revolutionary in producing the analytical war coverage or investigative journalism that mainstream media outlets offer. And even Wikipedia, that great symbol of the 21st-century faith in crowd wisdom, is pushing away from total openness.

To improve accuracy and avoid defamation, Wikipedia has added new layers of rules and editing, and the result has been a steady desertion by amateur editors and an increasing dominance by experts. Volunteers who make 100 or more edits a month now account for a majority of edits, and those who make 1,000 or more account for a quarter, according to Ed H. Chi, a researcher at the Palo Alto Research Center in California. Users who make nine edits or fewer each month are at least 15 times more likely than regulars to have their changes undone — an expert-amateur gap that has widened with time.

There is, meanwhile, an incipient backlash against unrestrained speech online. The often appalling and hateful nature of much commentary on the Web has stirred a debate in digital circles about ridding the Internet of anonymity. Web sites are now considering whether to require, for example, that people use real names or e-mail addresses when they speak online (a notion being explored in China, incidentally), or whether to give greater prominence to people who do not hide their identities, as The Huffington Post is planning to do.