Articles by Braden Cox

Braden Cox formerly wrote for the TLF.


Open Source Software Developers: Cheaper by the Dozen?

by on June 4, 2007 · 6 comments

Are FLOSS developers the future promise of a competitive ICT sector in the EU because they are…cheaper?

That’s the main point of Section 7.4 of the EC’s FLOSS report (Skills Development and Employment Generation), which argues that not only are FLOSSers faster and better than programmers using commercial software, they’re cheaper, too.

This analysis here is another in a series of blog posts on the EC FLOSS report. Previously, I’ve discussed how the report is a call to action for Europe’s policymakers, that FLOSS’s popularity is growing, and that many FLOSS developers live in the EU. The report’s authors claimed that FLOSSers work faster (ie. are more productive),  but as I discussed in FLOSS: The Software Hare that Beats the Proprietary Turtle?, the data didn’t really support that claim. In my last post I concluded that there was only a weak correlation that firms that contribute to FLOSS derive more revenue, on average, than non-contributing companies, and even if there were, the study was devoid of any cause/effect analysis.

By analyzing the EC FLOSS study, I’m not trying to beat up on FLOSS. Overall, the almost 300 page report is more interesting than it appears at first glance, and is actually a good case study on how / how not to devise a study to prove a public policy point. Instead, what really interested me was that the EC sponsored a study advocating for old fashioned industrial policy of preferences and antitrust actions aimed at promoting FLOSS over proprietary software.

Markets aren’t perfect, but government manipulations of supply and demand to achieve a particular result are notorious for very low payback. Moreover, the ICT industry has been a remarkable success in its own right and has driven productivity improvements in nearly every
sector, without the guiding hand of industrial policy like that being called for in the FLOSS study.

Getting back to the meat of this post, the study states that FLOSS developers should be less expensive because just about any teenager can become a FLOSS programmer through informal apprenticeships and learning on their own.

Here’s the logic: increase the supply of workers while holding demand constant, and wages will fall. This is simple economics, but what are the more intricate effects of FLOSS employment generation when it is married to a pro-FLOSS EU industrial policy? Would a FLOSS-driven ICT industry help the EU pursue its Lisbon strategy to increase jobs and growth?

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Social Networking Bill Moves in North Carolina

by on May 24, 2007

The North Carolina social networking bill, S 132, passed the Senate yesterday and is on its way to the House. This bill should concern all e-commerce companies, not just sites like MySpace. The definition of a "commercial social networking site" could still encompass many different websites — and the trend is for including more social networking components to all sorts of sites. And as I said in a previous post, age verification just won’t work.

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The Achilles Heel of Social Networking Age Verification in the Tar Heel State

by on May 15, 2007

The morning after North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper
(and others) “asked” MySpace.com to hand over the names of sex offenders on its
site, what do I do? I testify in Raleigh about a social networking bill. Talk about entering the lion’s den!

This is the latest development in what is becoming an intense battle over social networking safety. And as I saw first hand in  North Carolina, state
legislators are happy to be on the record for any bill that purports to protect children, even if it means mandating age verification techniques that ultimately work against the children we’re trying to protect.

Update: a good overview of the hearing is an article in today’s Raleigh News & Observer newspaper.

I testified on SB 132, now under consideration in North Carolina that would, among other things, require social networking sites like MySpace to verify the ages of their members and facilitate parental consent and parental access to their children’s social networking pages.

At first glance these seem like reasonable proposals.
Unfortunately, they aren’t.

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Like E-Commerce? Check Out 60 Minutes this Sunday

by on May 11, 2007

Y’all should watch this Sunday’s 60 Minutes CBS News show (May 13, 7pm EDT) about the National Association of Realtors (NAR) and its campaign to crush internet-based business models that discount commissions. My colleague Steve DelBianco appears in the piece, based on his role at eRealty.com, a startup that was thwarted by new rules at NAR.

You’ll be glad to know that Steve doesn’t call for any regulation — just exhorts the Realtors to avoid regulation and litigation by allowing more innovation and price competition in their own ranks.

The show airs at an eventful time for the real estate industry. Earlier this week, the FTC released a report that assessed how the real estate brokerage industry has lobbied for regulation in the name of consumer protection, but has the effect of competition prevention. The report calls for a repeal of real estate laws, rules and regulations that limit choices for consumers, limit competition for new brokerage models and don’t appear to provide any justifiable benefits for consumers. In this report, Steve is quoted multiple times

Finally, the Realtors are holding their mid-year convention next week here in Washington. Add the DoJ antitrust lawsuit against NAR and you have a perfect storm over barriers to e-commerce in the real estate space.

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EMI Removes DRM, Offers DFM – Evidence of the Market Working?

by on April 5, 2007 · 2 comments

Earlier this week music label EMI announced that it would sell songs on Apple’s iTunes without digital rights management. Yesterday Microsoft said it would do the same thing for its Zune Marketplace.

So do we have the beginnings of a significant move toward DFM – DRM-Free Music? Is this evidence that the market is working and responding to consumer demand? I think (hope) so.

EMI plans to offer DRM-free music for $1.29, compared to $0.99 for DRM-protected music. That buck 29 will also get you double the bit rate, or 256kbps, on downloaded songs. 256kb/s is still a far cry from the 1,411 kb/s that you get when buying a CD, but it will sound good enough for most listeners except for the audiophiles among us.

It makes sense to pay more for a product if you get more rights to do something with it. But I know that there are those people that might say DRM shouldn’t be around anyways, so consumers are paying more for something they should already have. Ultimately, consumers will decide with their dollars whether to buy a DRM version or a DFM version of their favorite music. Stay tuned….

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GPL v.3 – I Care Because Markets Care

by on April 3, 2007 · 32 comments

My TLF post last week on the new draft of the GPL v.3 (or as I referred to it, GPL Vendetta) sparked a number of exchanges. Neil McAllister at InfoWorld said in his article that V should be for Vindication, not vendetta. And in his post Tim Lee responded to Mark Blafkin’s thoughts on the draft GPL v.3. Mark has a recent response of his own where he ruminates on Richard Stallman’s alleged libertarianism.

All this interesting and passionate discourse leads me to wonder why we care so much about the GPL? Of the many tech policy issues, this one strikes a visceral nerve with a vocal cadre of techies. I’m less visceral and more analytically removed (not to imply that others aren’t analytical). I care not because I’m a programmer, but because markets care – the GPL has made major inroads into commercial enterprises! And as a lawyer, I care about how attorneys will be counseling their clients on the GPL 3 (as embodied in the current draft). In this regard, there’s an interesting SearchEnterpriseLinux.com article that features an interview of Jeff Seul, an IP attorney, where he states:

With other open source licenses out there, like the Mozilla public license, and the Apache license, you discover that they are brief and are in plain English. The GPLv3 is 12 pages with a 60-page explanatory document. I don’t know how people are going to cope with a 12-page licensing agreement with 60 pages of ancillary text – that’s 70-plus pages of text and it’s ambiguity run amok. If I ever had a client come to me, and they said they wanted to build a business around the GPLv3, and were asking for a legal opinion on it, this lawyer would not have the confidence in it to give them clear legal advice.

I wholeheartedly support the ability of the FSF to dictate its licensing terms – but ultimately the software market will – as counseled by lawyers – be the final arbiter of the GPL 3.

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GPL 3.0: v. (for Vendetta)

by on March 28, 2007

With the release of the most recent discussion draft today, one thing is immediately clear: this third version of the General Public License can be simply written “GPL v.” – where “v” stands not for “version” but for “vendetta.”

There’s little doubt that this GPL 3 draft is a vendetta against the patent non-assertion agreement we saw in the Microsoft and Novell deal. But it is also aimed at the use of technological protection measures like digital rights management. This may not upset the fundamentalists at the Free Software Foundation, but here’s something that I think will concern them: GPL code will become more isolated and less relevant in the technology marketplace.

Turning the Four Freedoms into the Ten Commandments

The GPL 3 draft is no longer just about protecting the four freedoms. Instead, it preaches about what can’t be done with software – thou shall not use DRM, thou shall not partner with proprietary software companies, etc. The draft contains provisions that block the use of anticircumvention technologies and patent non-assertion agreements. It’s the patent provision that attempts to strike a dagger at the heart of the collaboration between Microsoft and Novell.

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Illinois Online Dating Bill Defeated

by on March 22, 2007

Today the Illinois legislature did what the Florida legislature wouldn’t do – crush a bad online dating bill in committee.

I had a premonition that things would go well in Springfield. Hey, it’s the Land of Lincoln and Illinois is the state where I was born!

But superstitions aside, the members of a House
Judiciary Committee really carried the day here with their probing
questions and clued-in skepticism about HB 563, the Internet Dating Disclosure
and Safety Awareness Act.

Take Rep. Jim Sacia for
instance. He’s an ex-FBI agent that really knew the difference between background checks and criminal screenings. He said that criminal
screenings—the kind contemplated by all of the state online dating bills, were incomplete
and too easily defeated to mean anything.

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FLOSSers: Faster, Richer…and Better Looking?

by on March 20, 2007 · 4 comments

EurosignIn section 7.3, the EC FLOSS Report tells us that firms working on FLOSS are not only faster, they’re also richer. Geez, faster and richer? Are they better looking too? Yet despite the authors’ assertions, I’m not sure we should be green with FLOSS envy just yet.

The authors are trying to erect a foundation upon which to rest the report’s main argument: to grow European economies, the EU should bolster the European ICT sector by betting big on FLOSS. In 7.1 and 7.2 they claimed that FLOSSers work faster (are more productive). As I discussed in my last blog post, FLOSS: The Software Hare that Beats the Proprietary Turtle?, the data didn’t really support the claim. But we were willing to give the authors the benefit of the doubt because FLOSSers should work faster, given the often imitative nature of most FLOSS projects. In this section, however, they are starting to knowingly fill the foundation with hollow claims.

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Discouraged Advocate Seeks Legislators that Refuse to Coddle

by on March 15, 2007 · 6 comments

I traveled to Florida with a large dose of optimism and returned a jaded man – all in one day. Public policy work can do this to you – particularly when a bill you testify against gets passed unanimously by the committee that heard your testimony.

The occasion: testifying in Tallahassee on a bill that would regulate online dating websites. (HB 531 – The Internet Predator Awareness Act). It would require websites to disclose whether they perform criminal background checks on their members. It would also require disclosures about how to practice safe online dating and not to put too much faith in the results of criminal background checks.

That’s a lot of disclosures and disclaimers, stuff that most consumers will not read and could care less about – especially because a clear criminal background check is no excuse to let down your guard on common sense precautions (in my testimony I warned that this bill could give consumers a false sense of security).

But there’s a larger theme going on here – the nanny state of government is creeping into e-commerce. 

What are the benefits of this bill that the market isn’t providing? If security-conscious consumers want to use a service that provides background checks, they can do so already, and can even perform criminal checks on their own.

We don’t need government regulation to mandate which services a website must provide. Governments should protect us from decisions we can’t make, not from decisions we can make.

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