The fear of coming in second many times in a row will keep people out of the market... there will always be a full-time bounty hunter that will finish the project well before them.
This is definitely a weakness of the bounty scheme. Maybe a good arrangement would be to split a prize evenly among all the teams that finish the job within a predetermined time window. This might water down the prize enough to discourage greedy shark-like personalities who would choose to be full-time bounty hunters.
You will also see the exact opposite of open source happen. In order to successfully beat another team to the finish,
people will hoard code. Not just for that one project, they will hoard their entire code base so that no other team will have the advantage of their tool set.
Presumably a condition for winning the bounty is to release the source code as open source, at least for the project in question. You're right that there would be unreleased tools used by each team, and there would be an incentive to hoard them from other teams. But still, paying bounties for open source is a step (however incomplete) in a good direction.
Maybe if people feel strongly about these toolsets, they can put up bounties for their release as well. In any event, I don't think the world will ever conform to anybody's ideas of how things ought to be, not mine nor yours nor RMS's. You can argue persuasively, you can explain your reasoning, and you can set a good example, but you can't really control what people do.
Can you propose an alternative to bounties, where all parties do at least as well as they do with bounties, and programmers and teams don't have an incentive to hoard tools? Nothing springs to my mind, but any such scheme would be a vast boon to OSS.
The ransomware idea is an interesting one. On that page, you ask the question:
Can I announce how close the total is to the ransom, or would nobody pay knowing the source will be released soon?
Here's a thought. As you get closer to reaching the total, gradually lower your price. If you knew the volume-demand curve exactly, you could plan specific dates for stepping down the price, but that won't happen.
Maybe you'll want to schedule price reductions based on when you hit certain fractions of the total. You'd probably still want at least a rough guess of the volume-demand curve for your software, and you'd want to run some simulations. But the periodic price reductions would probably come to be regarded as an indication of your good faith that you really will release the source code later on.
A simplistic approach, assuming you're developing something over a long time, and catering to a market that is eager for the latest version, would be to open-source old versions based on a constant time delay (maybe six or twelve months). This would be a little like a time-compressed version of the patent system.
I visited the FCC website and read the following mission statement:
The mission of this independent government agency is to encourage competition in all communications markets and to protect the public interest.
What appears to be the intention of the ruling is to protect telephone companies from the competition posed by email and other forms of internet communication, such as internet telephony. It is unclear how the public interest is served by this ruling.
Why is the FCC chartered to "encourage competition"? I can only guess at the original intent of the charter, but my suspicion is that it is because competition is a reliable method of ensuring the highest quality of goods and services at the lowest price, consistent with the other goal "to protect the public interest".
By artificially raising the entry barrier to the internet for no good reason, this ruling also discourages advancement in the communication arts, by reducing the accessibility of the internet to those who would otherwise work as hobbyists to develop software and user interfaces, or act as testers for such developers.
The FCC should either change its mission statement to accurately reflect its updated(?) mission or it should act in accordance with the mission statement under which it was originally instituted.
Are you aware that a lot of people are initially quite intimidated by exactly the kinds of topics that are documented in O'Reilly books? Do you know anybody who learned Unix without buying or reading any O'Reilly books?
You may not have noticed that if the open source world is missing something, what it's missing is good documentation. Good documentation doesn't only help you, the experienced Unix user, it also lowers the barrier that your friends face in becoming Unix users. An argument against good documentation is an argument in favor of an exclusive elitist Unix priesthood, and I don't think you really meant that you want that.
Are you saying he's a parasite because he engages in profitable commerce? That's a pretty childish position. Some people are best motivated by profit. One can argue whether this is a character flaw, but at least it motivates them to do something. Some are close enough to retirement age that they can't afford to pour all their time into non-paying pursuits, even if they want to.
Tim O'Reilly has also been a prominent advocate of open source software. He has a much higher profile than you or I. He gets noticed, we don't. When looking at the effects of public opinion (and yes, we really do want public opinion to favor open source), his actions make a lot bigger dent than your and my cranial churnings.
The hexagonal shape refers to the arrangement of atoms along the surface of the tube. This is because both buckytubes and buckyballs are rolled-up sheets of graphite (rolled into cylinders and spheres respectively). Graphite is a hexagonally-tiled arrangement of sp2-hybridized carbons. Normally this hybridization has two single bonds and one double bond, so you could think of the graphite as a hexagonal tiling with a carbon atom at each vertex, and all the edges in one direction being double bonds, and all the remaining edges being single bonds.
Actually, X ray diffraction studies show that the bond lengths are all identical, so it's really more like each is a 1.666-order bond. This phenomenon, called resonance, also appears in benzene. It is thought to be a quantum superposition of all the possible different ways of arranging the double bonds. (What we call a double bond is actually a superposition of a sigma orbital and a pi orbital.)
The pi orbitals in a sheet of graphite or buckytube all blend together, and depending on the tube's chirality (how the hexagons are oriented relative to the cylindrical axis), this can either allow electrons to move up and down the tube very easily, or it can give semiconductor-like behavior. So a trick to building these kinds of circuits is to find joints that will allow you to join tubes of differing chirality.
Fullerenes are generally quite stable molecules, so it's not too surprising that they describe difficulty in getting current into and out of the buckytube. It turns out that it's not too hard to stick little molecular pieces onto the sides of buckytubes. Al Globus at NASA has done a lot of thinking and simulations relating to applications of nanotubes, including adding teeth to make them function as gears.
Possibly the best source of information on fullerenes is Richard Smalley's Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology at Rice University. Smalley received a Nobel prize for the discovery of fullerenes. The CNST has an interesting-looking PDF document describing the Carbon Nanotechnology Laboratory, and discussing the science of fullerenes and some of the potential applications. Fun stuff.
Another plug for the Free Software Bazaar
on
Open Source Funding
·
· Score: 1
Several people have already mentioned Axel Boldt's Free Software Bazaar, at http://visar.csustan.edu/bazaar/. Here are some points that may have gone unmentioned.
The bazaar is a mechanism for promising and organizing pledges. It is not actually involved in the transfer of funds or other compensation; you need to handle that offline. That's a good thing, because it allows you to specify your interest before you actually pay out your money. It also removes the worry that the bazaar is doing mischief.
The bazaar tracks deadbeats, so abuses to the honor system do not go unnoticed. If you promise money for a specific goal, and don't pay out when that goal is accomplished, your name goes onto a publicly available list of unreliable pledgers. That's also a good thing.
The nature of the goal to which a pledge is applied is to be specified by the pledger, not by the bazaar. It is the pledger's responsibility to make the goal specific enough to be meaningful.
Pledgers may tack their pledges onto existing goals. This means that the reward for achieving a goal is not fundamentally bounded, and is proportional to marketplace demand.
I think these points should answer all the concerns about creeping communism. The Free Software Bazaar is just about perfect from a free-market standpoint. Its only problem is its relative obscurity.
Maybe somebody should pledge money for advertising.
>...this was done > with boring old chemicals in test tubes rather than the exotic > "nano-machines", proposed by the Drexlerites, shrouded in their > mists of vapour.
Since you feel free to criticize the nanotech community, I'm confident that you've at least troubled yourself to read Engines of Creation. You will recall that it discussed the unfolding of future technology over a timeline of many decades. The reason that there are no "vaporware Drexlerite nano-machines" today is simply that the many decades have not yet elapsed.
There will probably be lots of prerequisite technological steps before we have a mature nanotechnology. Let's lump them under a few labels: "atomic manipulation", "replication" and "programmability".
Atomic manipulation is an extension of present-day synthetic chemistry, and the article about self-assembling plastic molecules is a good example. What we really want is a general ability, for a very broad range of structures, to build any such structure under laboratory conditions. A not-very-interesting example of a broad range of structures might be "everything that could possibly be made out of single-bonded carbons and hydrogens without violating physical law".
Replication is the really important piece, because it will make nanotech affordable. If there were no potatoes on Earth, you might imagine setting about making one in a lab. The first potato would cost an enormous amount of money, time, effort, grad students, academic careers, or whatever other currency you like. Because potatoes can replicate themselves with dirt, air, water, and sunshine, their price would quickly fall to vegetable-like prices.
Designing a replicator from scratch (no DNA, no ribosomes) is a hard engineering problem. We are likely to piggy-back on the replicative ability of biological systems for a long time to come. (Interesting work in this direction is being done by Tom Knight at M.I.T.) Novel replicators will require the development of advanced design and simulation software that does not yet exist.
Once you have self-replicating widgets that will do your manufacturing, you obviously want to be able to get them to build different things at different times, and so you program them. We already have many examples of programmable things, and a large number of skilled programmers, so this will be (relatively speaking) a no-brainer.
If you really want to show up those vapourous Drexlerites for the lazy slackers they are, design and demonstrate a programmable replicator that doesn't use DNA or ribosomes. Your place in history will be assured.
ET's article mentions that Boba Fett (the bounty hunter in stylish green aluminum) won't appear in this movie, "unforunately", like it's some kind of important omission. Apparently there are Boba Fett fans, which is a mystery to me. What's the appeal? The guy barely had a speaking part, never showed his face, and as far as I can tell, never made an important moral decision (since Star Wars is in large degree a morality play). Is anybody reading this a Boba Fett fan? Is so, why?
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Maybe if people feel strongly about these toolsets, they can put up bounties for their release as well. In any event, I don't think the world will ever conform to anybody's ideas of how things ought to be, not mine nor yours nor RMS's. You can argue persuasively, you can explain your reasoning, and you can set a good example, but you can't really control what people do.
Can you propose an alternative to bounties, where all parties do at least as well as they do with bounties, and programmers and teams don't have an incentive to hoard tools? Nothing springs to my mind, but any such scheme would be a vast boon to OSS.
Maybe you'll want to schedule price reductions based on when you hit certain fractions of the total. You'd probably still want at least a rough guess of the volume-demand curve for your software, and you'd want to run some simulations. But the periodic price reductions would probably come to be regarded as an indication of your good faith that you really will release the source code later on.
A simplistic approach, assuming you're developing something over a long time, and catering to a market that is eager for the latest version, would be to open-source old versions based on a constant time delay (maybe six or twelve months). This would be a little like a time-compressed version of the patent system.
What appears to be the intention of the ruling is to protect telephone companies from the competition posed by email and other forms of internet communication, such as internet telephony. It is unclear how the public interest is served by this ruling.
Why is the FCC chartered to "encourage competition"? I can only guess at the original intent of the charter, but my suspicion is that it is because competition is a reliable method of ensuring the highest quality of goods and services at the lowest price, consistent with the other goal "to protect the public interest".
By artificially raising the entry barrier to the internet for no good reason, this ruling also discourages advancement in the communication arts, by reducing the accessibility of the internet to those who would otherwise work as hobbyists to develop software and user interfaces, or act as testers for such developers.
The FCC should either change its mission statement to accurately reflect its updated(?) mission or it should act in accordance with the mission statement under which it was originally instituted.
Are you aware that a lot of people are initially quite intimidated by exactly the kinds of topics that are documented in O'Reilly books? Do you know anybody who learned Unix without buying or reading any O'Reilly books?
You may not have noticed that if the open source world is missing something, what it's missing is good documentation. Good documentation doesn't only help you, the experienced Unix user, it also lowers the barrier that your friends face in becoming Unix users. An argument against good documentation is an argument in favor of an exclusive elitist Unix priesthood, and I don't think you really meant that you want that.
Are you saying he's a parasite because he engages in profitable commerce? That's a pretty childish position. Some people are best motivated by profit. One can argue whether this is a character flaw, but at least it motivates them to do something. Some are close enough to retirement age that they can't afford to pour all their time into non-paying pursuits, even if they want to.
Tim O'Reilly has also been a prominent advocate of open source software. He has a much higher profile than you or I. He gets noticed, we don't. When looking at the effects of public opinion (and yes, we really do want public opinion to favor open source), his actions make a lot bigger dent than your and my cranial churnings.
Actually, X ray diffraction studies show that the bond lengths are all identical, so it's really more like each is a 1.666-order bond. This phenomenon, called resonance, also appears in benzene. It is thought to be a quantum superposition of all the possible different ways of arranging the double bonds. (What we call a double bond is actually a superposition of a sigma orbital and a pi orbital.)
The pi orbitals in a sheet of graphite or buckytube all blend together, and depending on the tube's chirality (how the hexagons are oriented relative to the cylindrical axis), this can either allow electrons to move up and down the tube very easily, or it can give semiconductor-like behavior. So a trick to building these kinds of circuits is to find joints that will allow you to join tubes of differing chirality.
Fullerenes are generally quite stable molecules, so it's not too surprising that they describe difficulty in getting current into and out of the buckytube. It turns out that it's not too hard to stick little molecular pieces onto the sides of buckytubes. Al Globus at NASA has done a lot of thinking and simulations relating to applications of nanotubes, including adding teeth to make them function as gears.
Possibly the best source of information on fullerenes is Richard Smalley's Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology at Rice University. Smalley received a Nobel prize for the discovery of fullerenes. The CNST has an interesting-looking PDF document describing the Carbon Nanotechnology Laboratory, and discussing the science of fullerenes and some of the potential applications. Fun stuff.
The bazaar is a mechanism for promising and organizing pledges. It is not actually involved in the transfer of funds or other compensation; you need to handle that offline. That's a good thing, because it allows you to specify your interest before you actually pay out your money. It also removes the worry that the bazaar is doing mischief.
The bazaar tracks deadbeats, so abuses to the honor system do not go unnoticed. If you promise money for a specific goal, and don't pay out when that goal is accomplished, your name goes onto a publicly available list of unreliable pledgers. That's also a good thing.
The nature of the goal to which a pledge is applied is to be specified by the pledger, not by the bazaar. It is the pledger's responsibility to make the goal specific enough to be meaningful.
Pledgers may tack their pledges onto existing goals. This means that the reward for achieving a goal is not fundamentally bounded, and is proportional to marketplace demand.
I think these points should answer all the concerns about creeping communism. The Free Software Bazaar is just about perfect from a free-market standpoint. Its only problem is its relative obscurity.
Maybe somebody should pledge money for advertising.
(BTW, "kzinti" is plural. Maybe you want "kzin"?)
> ...this was done
> with boring old chemicals in test tubes rather than the exotic
> "nano-machines", proposed by the Drexlerites, shrouded in their
> mists of vapour.
Since you feel free to criticize the nanotech community, I'm confident
that you've at least troubled yourself to read Engines of Creation.
You will recall that it discussed the unfolding of future technology
over a timeline of many decades. The reason that there are no
"vaporware Drexlerite nano-machines" today is simply that the many
decades have not yet elapsed.
There will probably be lots of prerequisite technological steps before
we have a mature nanotechnology. Let's lump them under a few labels:
"atomic manipulation", "replication" and "programmability".
Atomic manipulation is an extension of present-day synthetic
chemistry, and the article about self-assembling plastic molecules is
a good example. What we really want is a general ability, for a very
broad range of structures, to build any such structure under
laboratory conditions. A not-very-interesting example of a broad range
of structures might be "everything that could possibly be made out of
single-bonded carbons and hydrogens without violating physical law".
Replication is the really important piece, because it will make
nanotech affordable. If there were no potatoes on Earth, you might
imagine setting about making one in a lab. The first potato would cost
an enormous amount of money, time, effort, grad students, academic
careers, or whatever other currency you like. Because potatoes can
replicate themselves with dirt, air, water, and sunshine, their price
would quickly fall to vegetable-like prices.
Designing a replicator from scratch (no DNA, no ribosomes) is a hard
engineering problem. We are likely to piggy-back on the replicative
ability of biological systems for a long time to come. (Interesting
work in this direction is being done by Tom Knight at M.I.T.) Novel
replicators will require the development of advanced design and
simulation software that does not yet exist.
Once you have self-replicating widgets that will do your
manufacturing, you obviously want to be able to get them to build
different things at different times, and so you program them. We
already have many examples of programmable things, and a large number
of skilled programmers, so this will be (relatively speaking) a
no-brainer.
If you really want to show up those vapourous Drexlerites for the lazy
slackers they are, design and demonstrate a programmable replicator
that doesn't use DNA or ribosomes. Your place in history will be
assured.
ET's article mentions that Boba Fett (the bounty
hunter in stylish green aluminum) won't appear in
this movie, "unforunately", like it's some kind of
important omission. Apparently there are Boba
Fett fans, which is a mystery to me. What's the
appeal? The guy barely had a speaking part, never
showed his face, and as far as I can tell, never made an important moral decision (since Star Wars is in large degree a morality play). Is anybody reading this a Boba Fett fan? Is so, why?