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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In my latest column on GigaOM, I speak to the meteoric rise of “patent reform” as an issue for Washington lobbyists. As Tim Lee points out in his latest entry, it isn’t always clear that patents=innovation. Irony note: it is Verizon — not Vonage — that is a member of the Coalition for Patent Fairness, which aims to reduce the burdens of patent litigation:
When Democrats took control of Congress last election, the lobbyists for all the big technology and telecom companies in Washington pulled out their wish lists, ripped them up, and re-arranged their legislative priorities.
Gone was the push for sweeping telecommunications legislation, hemispheric-wide free-trade agreements and limitations on Internet taxes. Only a Republican Congress and White House could agree upon those.
A new priority has emerged: overhauling the nation’s patent system. Seemingly out of nowhere, it is suddenly all the talk of Washington’s political-corporate machinations.
Tech Policy Weekly from the Technology Liberation Front is a weekly podcast about technology policy from TLF’s learned band of contributors. This week we took the podcast on the road and recorded live at our Alcohol Liberation Front happy hour at the Science Club in Washington, DC. Voices on the show this week include Jim Harper of the Cato Institute, David Robinson of The American, Tim Lee of the Show Me Institute, PJ Doland of PJ Doland Web Design, James Gattuso of the Heritage Foundation, Jerry Brito of the Mercatus Center, and Adam Thierer of PFF. Topics include,
- Scholars bypass established journals and publishing their research online
- The growth of the breadth of patents
- The government’s plan to give everyone a free digital TV converter box
- The future of physical media in a digital age
There are several ways to listen to the TLF Podcast. You can press play on the player below to listen right now, or download the MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the podcast by clicking on the button for your preferred service. And do us a favor, Digg this podcast!
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An insightful post by Don Marti on the economics of peer production:
Linux started as a peer production project in 1991, and got its first vendor-supported device driver in 1994 and its first full-time paid contributor (Leonard Zubkoff, VA Research) in 1997. Leonard started off writing SCSI drivers in his spare time, then got a job doing RAID support — so that VA could sell high-margin boxes with RAID, not just the commodity one-processor, one-drive machines they started with.
Today, there’s a flexible and socially connected interface between the kernel team and the hardware companies. A driver developer has to be part of both organizations. The payoffs for plugging into both your company’s management structure and a peer production project include that you get to eliminate a lot of duplication of effort by having other people help with the infrastructure that supports your driver, and you get free code reviews and developer training. Greg says that at one company, one person maintains the Linux driver, and 150 are needed to maintain the driver for a common proprietary OS.
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In 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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I’ve got a review of Wikinomics up over at The American. Here’s the meat of it:
If Wikinomics has one weakness, it’s that the authors fail to fully appreciate the extent to which market mechanisms lose their salience in the context of peer production. For example, they urge Yahoo! to set up a profit-sharing scheme within its Flickr photo-sharing site and its del.icio.us social bookmarking site, in which the creators of the most popular content would get paid for their contributions. This seems entirely unnecessary. The sites must already be offering users sufficient incentives to participate, or they never would have signed up in the first place.
Moreover, introducing payments could create new problems. Paying a handful of the most popular contributors could create feelings of envy and resentment among the vast majority of users who would continue to be unpaid. The lure of cash payments might also induce some users to attempt to game the system. Paying contributors would be highly inefficient, as there would be substantial overhead in locating, authenticating, and mailing (fairly small) checks to thousands of people. The money would be far better spent hiring more programmers to further improve the site, making it more valuable for all users.
This points to a more general principle: peer production succeeds largely because it eliminates the frictions that accompany commercial activities. Proprietary software companies face a variety of costs, including finding and hiring programmers, finding and hiring sales and support personnel, supervising and evaluating employees, negotiating contracts with other software companies, filing patent applications, renting office space, and so forth. Peer production eliminates most of these costs, as contributors self-select the parts of a project that interest them most (which will, more often than not, be the parts to which they’ll have the most to contribute) and contribute their changes directly to the project, without the substantial overhead that would be required to keep track of who contributed what and how much each contributor was owed. Introducing financial payments into the equation can often undermine the very efficiencies that make the system work in the first place.
Also, don’t miss the latest edition of The American’s new podcast, which features yours truly discussing the basics of peer production with managing editor David Robinson.
There’s Viacom vs. Gootube in the courts of law.
And here are some of the relevant discussions in Washington, D.C.:
At the Advisory Committee to the Congressional Internet Caucus’ State of the Net Conference 2007, there was a panel discussion entitled, “User-Generated Content – Can Copyright Tolerate Mixing & Mashing?” Rob Pegoraro of The Washington Post moderated. Panelists were Jim DeLong of the Progress & Freedom Foundation, Pam Samuelson of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology and Steven Starr of Revver.com. Video here. (See if you have a better experience with it than I did.)
And tomorrow, PFF is having an event on Capitol Hill titled “What Goes Up Must Come Down: Copyright and Process in the Age of User-Posted Content.”
This is the age of user-generated content. Let’s hear what you think of these events in the comments.
Randy Picker has a great post on interoperability and the law:
In one classic case, Borland did this when it sold the spreadsheet Quattro Pro with an alternative interface that emulated that of Lotus 1-2-3, the dominant spreadsheet of the day. Lotus tried to rely on copyright law to defeat Borland and failed though do remember that the vote in the Supreme Court was 4-4 and ties go to the lower court winner, in this case Borland. When I switched my main browsing program from Internet Explorer to Firefox, Firefox looked on my hard disk to find the links that I had stored as IE Favorites, again reducing the transaction costs of switching.
But we see how design matters when we return to my tagged stories. I don’t know for sure—perhaps the computer savvy can tell me—but I don’t think much if any of my Google Reader info is stored locally on my machine. I have been using my wife’s laptop at home at night while my laptop has been dying and, once I have logged in, Reader works on her machine as it would if I were logged on my machine. I don’t think that there is any locally-stored info for FeedDemon to examine were I trying to switch over both my feeds list and my tagged stories. And the question is whether FeedDemon could write something that would burrow through my Google Reader “subscription”—that seems like a fair description—to extract my tagged stories. And these design issues are even more embedded than that suggests, as Nick Carr makes clear in his recent post on this.
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Here’s another installment in my series of blog posts analyzing the European Commission’s free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) report. In prior posts, 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. In short, the report contains ambitious policy proposals to transform Europe’s ICT sector through industrial policies — I’ve called it the new Airbus project for the European economy. As I get further into the report, however, I’m becoming more skeptical of the report’s overall claim that open source software can rescue Europe’s software industry.
Here’s why – the authors go to the extreme to show FLOSS in a good light, without giving much emphasis to how FLOSS has so far achieved its growing and respected status. Why do I care? Well, I haven’t read much critique on the report, and it’s often fun to be the dissenting voice. And I’m sick of hearing that open source software will rescue the planet from the evils of commercial software and the capitalist system that spawned it. I know that TLF readers are savvy enough to stay away from such absolute statements, but many others in the blogosphere aren’t.
Moreover, at the public policy level, there’s a lot of confusion I’m anxious to clear up between open source the license and the community development model that will often characterize open source software. Finally, I’m becoming more interested in free and open source software on a personal level, which can be technically challenging and at times overwhelming.
So…here I’ll analyze the report’s claim in Section 7 that “FLOSSers Work Faster”.
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Tech Policy Weekly from the Technology Liberation Front is a weekly podcast about technology policy from TLF’s learned band of contributors. The shows’s panelists this week are Jerry Brito, Tim Lee, Adam Thierer, and Braden Cox. Topics include,
- Top Wikipedia editor “Essjay” is revealed as a fraud
- States are pushing age verification mandates for social networking sitesl
- Do first responders really need more spectrum?
There are several ways to listen to the TLF Podcast. You can press play on the player below to listen right now, or download the MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the podcast by clicking on the button for your preferred service. And do us a favor, Digg this podcast!
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.