Consider the feminist movement. Aside from folks who have a special interest in feminism, how many of you can name ten people who speak for feminism? (That's "speak", present tense. Dead spokeswomen don't count.)
I'm tempted to blame this on the degenerate state of society, the schools, the media, etc., but I'm not sure if past generations were any better. Maybe it's just human nature to reduce ideologies to personalities. That's what you get for being a social animal.
From: ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix Subject: Re: LINUX is obsolete Date: 30 Jan 92 13:44:34 GMT [much snippage]
... 5 years from now everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5. Newsgroups: comp.os.minix From: kevin@nuchat.sccsi.com (Kevin Brown) Subject: Re: LINUX is obsolete Organization: Where??? Date: Fri, 31 Jan 1992 07:43:47 GMT [much more snippage]
Maybe. But by then, the 386/486 will probably be where the PC is now: everyone will have one and they'll be dirt cheap. The timing will be about right. In which case Linux will fit right in, wouldn't you say?
The legislative power hasn't "swung away from our elected representatives"; they're pushing it away.
When politicians want to satisfy a wide range of conflicting interest groups simultaneously, they have everything to gain by writing a vague law, telling every side that the law suits their needs, and then letting the courts figure out what the law really means.
Also, they like doing social engineering through tort law, since it allows them to give an interest group an economic benefit (i.e., the right to sue for a certain newly-defined offense) without raising taxes.
This was written in response to Ira Magaziner's recommendations for government regulation, or lack thereof, on electronic commerce. In the introduction, which I snipped, DeLong gave Michael Froomkin, Hal Varian, and Paul Romer credit for most of the ideas in the essay.
As I read over the Magaziner report, and think about how what it says and leaves unsaid interacts with the other pressures on government policy, I find myself more worried about the future than most of the speakers at the conference. Look at the principles of the Magaziner report: "the private sector should lead," "avoid undue government restrictions," "government should provide a predictable, minimalist, consistent, and simple legal environment," "recognize unique qualities," and "facilitate global electronic commerce." Look at how they are applied: No internet taxes, but also no pools of government money to help provide the public-goods commons for our global electronic village. An information superhighway, as the Vice President used to say, but one without federally-funding. A heavy push to embrace and extend private intellectual property rights. A push to end, worldwide governments' ability to require compulsory licensing as a matter of course. Extension of the property rights of current trademark holders, at least for those with deep pockets. Privacy principles which seem to be honored in the breach because the private sector has not yet led.
It seems to me that Ira Magaziner and his political masters have a view that government is the surveyor of the electronic frontier. The government's job is to draw the property lines--the north boundary of parcel 24 runs from the cottonwood tree to the waterhole--set up rules for selling off the plots, make sure that the railroads get their share of the land, and provide a judge to rule on disputes and a sheriff to enforce the judge's orders.
Now when you are settling a real frontier, this kind of "letting the private sector lead" works pretty well. We may not like what happens to the Indians, or what happens if the judge decides that no witness born in Mexico is credible, or how much land the railroads get, or what happens when the cattle baron has his hired hands homestead all the waterholes in the county. But in the main letting the private sector lead works very well. The Invisible Hand of the marketplace does a good job at guiding people to reach productive and fruitful decisions as to how to use resources as they settle the frontier.
But I suspect that the information economy is going to be different. I may be wrong, but I think it is going to be different enough that the market economy is going to work much less well than we are used to. I suspect that going down the road marked by the Magaziner report is going to leave us suffering from carpal tunnel syndrome of the Invisible Hand.
For one example, consider the push to embrace and extend intellectual property rights. The idea is that by making more information appropriable, we are making incentives better. After all, who is going to finance work if you cannot make money off of it? But when I look at current stock market valuations, I find it hard to believe that many internet enterprises today cannot find financing because investors fear that they will not be able to profit from the consumer value they create. And the dangers of providing broad rights to intellectual property are great.
You see, information goods are what economist Paul Romer calls non-rival. You can sell it more than once. Just because one of your customers is "using" a piece of information doesn't mean that another--or many others--cannot be. This non-rivalry gives the largest producer the potential of unlimited economies of scale. It means that, as Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian write in their Information Rules book, information goods markets will not, cannot look like the competitive markets in which the Invisible Hand works well.
So do we break up every very successful company once a decade? Do we learn to live with natural monopoly and be happy about it? Bear in mind that this time the economies of scale or so large that it is monopoly, and not the early twentieth-century oligopolies that we face. I suspect that in many cases in the future we will find that in market after market the most powerful competitor of the dominant firm is its own installed base, the products that it sold to end users as it was becoming dominant. It seems to me that some leakage or slippage in control over intellectual property may well be desirable.
The difference, to this non-lawyer's eyes, is that the GPL terminates your right to distribute patent-covered code after you become bound by a court order or an agreement with a patent-holder.
The APSL's termination clause applies if Apple Inc. decides that it would rather yank the patent-covered code than resolve the patent dispute or write a patent-free version.
Perhaps Apple's lawyers were afraid that using a GPL-style termination clause would expose them, in the event of a patent suit, to additional damages, or would make it harder for them to settle such a suit.
A legal question: Suppose I use code covered by the APSL, some company (call it "Unisys") sues Apple for patent infringement, and Apple withdraws the code I'm using from circulation rather than fighting the suit. If I felt that Unisys's patent claim was bogus, would I have grounds to take Unisys to court?
A sales tax is a regressive tax, anyway, since it hits the poor (who have to buy stuff like food, etc.) more than it hits the rich (who are only taxed on the money they spend, rather than invest).
In some states, food and clothing are exempt from sales taxes; presumably this is to reduce the sales-tax burden on the poor.
I agree that patents are far more expensive than copyrights, but then again giving away code is more expensive than selling it, too.
Once you've written a program, the only expense in giving the code away is "opportunity cost". That is, you own the code's copyright without having to pay anyone anything (at least, in the USA and other Berne Convention countries), and by giving it away you're giving up the opportunity to make money off that copyright.
On the other hand, to get a patent, you have to pay a specialist mucho $$$ up front to write a proper application.
If I had a patentable software idea, I'd rather just publish the idea, thereby preventing any later inventor from patenting it, and give the cash to some worthy charity.
If we want to improve the breadth and strength of the Open Source software that's out there, we don't need more money per se, we need more programmers (and writers, and trainers, and testers, and...). Money is only useful to the community insofar as it buys food, housing, Net access, etc. for its members.
So who's evangelizing for Linux, and helping people learn about it, in the schools? Not the elite universities where you graduate $80K in debt... what's happening in the state schools, the community colleges, and for that matter, the high schools? Is anyone working on an open-source Logo? (No, no, not that logo -- this Logo!
--sethg, who has a degree in education, but is working as a tech writer because, well, see above about debt...
If I understand these figures correctly, they mean that Heinz had a profit of about $800 million on their $9.5 billion of sales, or less than a penny for each dollar of sales. (Somebody who actually knows finance, please verify my research and my math!)
So the profit margin on a bottle of ketchup is around one percent.
When Linux really becomes a commodity OS, and every commercial Linux provider has to deal with this kind of profit margin, will Red Hat be able to subsidize development of open-source Linux tools and applications? Or will the company have to spend all of its revenue on providing tech support, and tell its employees that if they want to write a new tool or application, they'll have to do it on their own time?
Kelsey and Schneier proposed an escrow system for electronic cash in "The Street Performer Protocol." As the title implies, this was written to deal with artistic works, but it wouldn't be hard to adapt it for open-source financing.
Brad DeLong, an economist at UC-Berkeley, points out that since the Industrial Revolution began, many other sectors of the economy have had amazing growth spurts: while these were significant spurts, the rate of growth eventually slowed.
For example, in 1906, the average car cost--in 1993 dollars--about $53,000; by 1918, the inflation-adjusted cost was less than half and the quality was about twice as good. Some intellectuals of that era saw the Ford Motor Company as the model for a better America. (See this essay by DeLong for more details.)
Alas, this trend has not continued for the past 80 years. Perhaps computer technology will maintain its growth rate for as long as Kurzweil etal. predict, but I wouldn't bet my 401(k) on it.
Also, regarding XML's requirement to use Unicode, if XML permitted multiple character sets, wouldn't the parsing become much more complicated?A related question for the Linux GUI geeks: is anyone working on making the text widgets in the various GUI toolkits handle bidirectional text properly? The last time I bought a computer, I bought a reconditioned Mac, specifically because I knew I could get decent Hebrew support with WorldScript.
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I'm tempted to blame this on the degenerate state of society, the schools, the media, etc., but I'm not sure if past generations were any better. Maybe it's just human nature to reduce ideologies to personalities. That's what you get for being a social animal.
When politicians want to satisfy a wide range of conflicting interest groups simultaneously, they have everything to gain by writing a vague law, telling every side that the law suits their needs, and then letting the courts figure out what the law really means.
Also, they like doing social engineering through tort law, since it allows them to give an interest group an economic benefit (i.e., the right to sue for a certain newly-defined offense) without raising taxes.
As a counterpoint to all the libertarian cheerleading around here, let me offer the following excerpt from an essay by Brad DeLong, an economics professor at Berkeley. (Click here for the complete essay and click here for DeLong's home page.)
This was written in response to Ira Magaziner's recommendations for government regulation, or lack thereof, on electronic commerce. In the introduction, which I snipped, DeLong gave Michael Froomkin, Hal Varian, and Paul Romer credit for most of the ideas in the essay.
The APSL's termination clause applies if Apple Inc. decides that it would rather yank the patent-covered code than resolve the patent dispute or write a patent-free version.
Perhaps Apple's lawyers were afraid that using a GPL-style termination clause would expose them, in the event of a patent suit, to additional damages, or would make it harder for them to settle such a suit.
A legal question: Suppose I use code covered by the APSL, some company (call it "Unisys") sues Apple for patent infringement, and Apple withdraws the code I'm using from circulation rather than fighting the suit. If I felt that Unisys's patent claim was bogus, would I have grounds to take Unisys to court?
In some states, food and clothing are exempt from sales taxes; presumably this is to reduce the sales-tax burden on the poor.
Once you've written a program, the only expense in giving the code away is "opportunity cost". That is, you own the code's copyright without having to pay anyone anything (at least, in the USA and other Berne Convention countries), and by giving it away you're giving up the opportunity to make money off that copyright.
On the other hand, to get a patent, you have to pay a specialist mucho $$$ up front to write a proper application.
If I had a patentable software idea, I'd rather just publish the idea, thereby preventing any later inventor from patenting it, and give the cash to some worthy charity.
So who's evangelizing for Linux, and helping people learn about it, in the schools? Not the elite universities where you graduate $80K in debt ... what's happening in the state schools, the community colleges, and for that matter, the high schools? Is anyone working on an open-source Logo? (No, no, not that logo -- this Logo!
--sethg, who has a degree in education, but is working as a tech writer because, well, see above about debt...
- $ 9.5 billion annual sales (from a CBS Marketwatch article)
- $19 billion market capitalization (from Wired's stock-lookup service)
- Price/earnings ratio of 24 (ditto)
If I understand these figures correctly, they mean that Heinz had a profit of about $800 million on their $9.5 billion of sales, or less than a penny for each dollar of sales. (Somebody who actually knows finance, please verify my research and my math!)So the profit margin on a bottle of ketchup is around one percent.
When Linux really becomes a commodity OS, and every commercial Linux provider has to deal with this kind of profit margin, will Red Hat be able to subsidize development of open-source Linux tools and applications? Or will the company have to spend all of its revenue on providing tech support, and tell its employees that if they want to write a new tool or application, they'll have to do it on their own time?
Kelsey and Schneier proposed an escrow system for electronic cash in "The Street Performer Protocol." As the title implies, this was written to deal with artistic works, but it wouldn't be hard to adapt it for open-source financing.
For example, in 1906, the average car cost--in 1993 dollars--about $53,000; by 1918, the inflation-adjusted cost was less than half and the quality was about twice as good. Some intellectuals of that era saw the Ford Motor Company as the model for a better America. (See this essay by DeLong for more details.)
Alas, this trend has not continued for the past 80 years. Perhaps computer technology will maintain its growth rate for as long as Kurzweil etal. predict, but I wouldn't bet my 401(k) on it.
For language labeling, what's wrong with Unicode Technical Report #7: Plane 14 Characters for Language Tags?
Also, regarding XML's requirement to use Unicode, if XML permitted multiple character sets, wouldn't the parsing become much more complicated?A related question for the Linux GUI geeks: is anyone working on making the text widgets in the various GUI toolkits handle bidirectional text properly? The last time I bought a computer, I bought a reconditioned Mac, specifically because I knew I could get decent Hebrew support with WorldScript.