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As usual... clowns likes you shriek about abuse/harassment and have NEVER once actually looked at the stats.

Studies

Pew

Demos

Both these studies show that:

1. Men get more harassment
2. Women are the majority DOING the harassment.

In fact, these studies show not that men hate women, but that women hate everyone. Strangely, the media keeps fucking quiet about this.

How is Microsoft holding free software innovation back? How is this Office Suite or Open Office more innovative than MS Office? At least they innovated the new Ribbons interface whereas OO seems to be stuck on cloning the older versions. The only better thing I've seen in OO was that it used a gzipped xml compared to the opaque binary files that MS Office uses, but this hardly matters for the business users out there.

Your questions are important ones and need good answers for those who don't see the obvious. I don't know if you read my blog entry "SCO finally dead! MS next?" even though I don't prove my statements there about Microsoft having hold free innovation back, merely indicates the explanation for those who have same type of insight as me, which is not rare, about 50% of the people I know have this insight.

However, if you are very young and have grown up with the PC only, no Unix, no Lisa, no Mac, no Amiga then I don't expect you to have this insight. To achieve this you need to care a lot about computers and have been around them for a few decades. For my own I took my MSc in engineering physics with a enhanced focus on computer science 1981. After that I was working with software development and systems design the next ten years, teaching, research and development the next ten years, resulting in a PhD in computer science 2003 (my thesis, pdf) and I am now working as a researcher and research consultant in own company when at the same time developing a new business idea a mass innovation concept Wish-IT® to encourage free innovation, to give consumers, manufacturers and investors what they want.

To make a few brief statements about Microsoft.

1. Bill Gates is smart, but he lacks visions and he doesn't really care much about computers and computer science. He is a hacker, but unfortunately lacking the philosophy and spirit of a hacker his interest was just to make money on computer hacks. OK, something he managed quite well though...
2. Bill Gates as being the

An MIT prof just released a new book that you can read online called Democratizing Innovation. I haven't read the whole thing yet but it looks like he may be on to something. Also see Pro-Am Revolution .

• Calling them "Pro-Ams" - amateurs who pursue a hobby to a professional standard - it suggests such people should receive government funding to "promote community cohesion".

Fishing for the details in the report..

• In sum our main policy proposals for promoting Pro-Am participation include the ideas listed below.

  • The government should launch a Pro-Am fellowship programme, investing small sums in community Pro- Ams. This might be modelled on localised versions of the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts, which provide fellowships for innovators, and be funded by the Big Lottery Fund.
  • Promoting Pro-Am culture should be a central focus for public service media. A prime example is the BBC's Neighbourhood Gardener scheme, developed with the Royal Horticultural Society, which is modelled on the US Master Gardener scheme, in which 60,000 collegeaccredited amateur gardeners provide millions of hours of expertise free of charge to other gardeners in their locality.
  • Pro-Ams should play a much larger role in innovation policy. Lead users should play a larger role in foresight exercises to chart the future course of innovation, and policies to deregulate markets should also open up spaces for Pro-Am innovations. Pro-Am communities are the new R & D labs of the digital economy.
  • As underused publicly-owned bandwidth is auctioned off some spectra should be reserved as an innovation commons for techie Pro-Ams - the kind that helped create the WiFi revolution - to play and experiment with. Government should develop innovation policies to fund open source communities as competitors to proprietary incumbents.

It looks like they are trying to recognise and reward volunteers at the community level. Interesting -- I especially like the part about giving out unused bandwidth. (grin)