Re:R&D killed by Free software?
on
Ask Robert Young
·
· Score: 1
From MSFT's annual report, $3.775 billion or 16% of total revenue. I couldn't find similar numbers on redhat's site, all there corporate info was focused on share price blather.
Re:R&D killed by Free software?
on
Ask Robert Young
·
· Score: 1
RedHat can't develop a major system enhancement within large portions of the OS
Redhat employs Alan Cox. Sounds like they are investing in major system enhancements.
I've been fairly pleased with Redhat initiatives like The Center for the Public Domain which funds ibiblio (was Metalab, was Sunsite) and other groups working for freedom of information. We know that free software is political and having a representative in various political processes can be helpful. So, what standards bodies is Redhat on, what kind of political lobbying does it do and what issues does it advocate in those fora?
You are referring to 802.11 devices that occupy the unlicensed ISM band I presume? Since its unlicensed spectrum the FCC imposes a power limit of 1 watt to keep interference under control.
MMDS occupies regulated spectrum and thus can operate at much higher power and is able to penetrate obstructions like trees.
The question was about client software that would meet RMS's requirements, aka be free software. The link you gave is to streamingserver.org which mainly has info on streaming servers. It does have a two links to clients, one is to a Java API, the other is to a non-free Mac client.
My google and freshmeat searches turn up
http://www.kom.e-technik.tu-darmstadt.de/kom-pla ye r/
Open source isn't culture imperialism, or, to acknowledge those who speak of the "GNU virus", at least not the kind I'm referring to. I was referring generally to the practice of buying a country's media infrastructure or overwhelming its native culture by flooding distribution channels with US memes (that are usually materialistic in nature). Specifically in this case, AOL/TW is getting a leg up on local competition and establishing itself as the dominant Internet player, thus being in a position to impose its hypercommercialized vision of the internet on another society.
I should have been a bit more clear to drop something like that on the discussion. Here's an
article from The Nation by Robert McChesney. Choice quote from an analyst at PaineWebber :
"What you are seeing," says Christopher Dixon, media analyst for the investment firm PaineWebber, "is the creation of a global oligopoly. It happened to the oil and automotive industries earlier this century; now it is happening to the entertainment industry."
So, I'm glad that they aren't running CE, but as rgmoore points out elsewhere in this thread, its an appliance so it doesn't really matter. I guess one of the goals of free software is to make software a commodity, so I guess this is a sign of success in that area, which is great and that I don't want to detract from. AOL/TW could turn out to be a bigger fish to fry than M$.
Intel isn't the big player in this deal, its AOL/TW. AOL did the deal with the bank for distribution, Intel was just selected to provide the hardware. Definitely a score for Intel but seeding the open market for AOL subscribers is what this deal is about.
Only 1 in 10 homes worldwide currently has a PC and room for growth in this new market is now best found not in the U.S. market, Welch said.
This is a general trend of the media giants, the US market is "mature" so there's not as much room to grow, so they go abroad. This is what's referred to when you here the phrase "US cultural imperialism".
This is particularly disturbing because its the Internet, AOL/TW is trying to corner the Internet market in a whole country. The markets that they are going to push into aren't going to have an Internet that developed in the noncommercial way that it did in the US, they are going to be commercial from the get go.
Perhaps I wasn't clear. The public has certain public interest requirements in the regulated spectrum in question through the ITFS service. ITFS licensees use the regulated spectrum it shares with MDS (and now MMDS) to provide instructional television services, these licesees are nonprofit entities.
I meant to suggest that as that spectrum is being redeveloped from 1 way video delivery to 2 way broadband networking that the public retain public interest requirements in that spectrum by revisting ITFS licensing. Mr. Shirky raised the issue of a public wireless network. Since a minimum of public interest is being served by the ITFS service and much of the spectrum is being leased to Sprint and Worldcomm anyway, it seems that a better use of spectrum already set aside for public benefit would be to create such a public network.
Shirky isn't referring to services such as San Francisco's Ricochet, a wireless Internet access network provider from San Jose's Metricom. He wants to know whether citizens will be given free or subsidized wireless access, as if it were a municipal utility like water. He muses, "In New York, we have laws that give zoning variances for skyscrapers in return for creating public spaces. These public spaces could easily include 802.11b networks."
A better solution for Mr. Shirky's (slashdot interview) proposal would be to use the adjacent regulated spectrum that is being used for MMDS, a new broadband wireless service that is being rolled out.
The MMDS service occupies the same spectrum as ITFS (warning government website, design will make you cry), a service underutilized by universities to provide public service. The FCC is allowing these licenses to be snatched up by MMDS providers for gaining the licensees much ($40 according to itfs.org) and the public for which the service was created nothing.
Seems to me that putting some real public interest obligations on those licenses in the form of providing public wireless access would be a better use of that spectrum.
The "incredible" 90%+ figure is in fact incredible. I've seen this particular piece of misdirection ove and over, where "media" is redefined as "mass media", and then "mass media" is redefined as "national TV".
I'll have to dig out my copy of The Media Monopoly by Ben Bagdikian but I recall "the media" being defined rather broadly to include books, magazines, newspapers, a/v recordings as well as broadcast.
Note, by the way, that my argument is not that there is *not* corporate news. Note that my argument is not even that the Bix 6 are a result of contraction. My argument is simply that expansion of media is outstripping the contraction.
Interesting, thanks for clarifying that. Certainly it can be agreed that since the 70's technology has expanded the amount and range of media experiences available to the individual consumer. Your phrasing of this reminds me of a speech by Mark Cooper of the Consumer Federation of America at a conference (sorry doesn't have his speech), in which he talked about how at the same time that we are seeing technology expanding media potential (and thus the potential of civil society) we are seeing a retreat (or contraction) caused by coporatization of this media. This seems to be very similar to what you just stated, since you acknowledge that coporatization is a countervailing force. Dr. Cooper however saw a potential for the concentration of media in fewer and fewer hands to ultimately reverse the gains the technology has made.
McChesney in particular is pessimistic about the Web's potential to correct the media's current defects. He believes that we're in a brief window of openess that will close once the major media oligopies get their act together and team up with the communications infrastructure providers to turn the Web into a hypercommercialized interactive TV system. From this interview I gather that you don't think consumers will accept that. Consumer spending power works well in competitive markets not so well otherwise. Given the concerns about media concentration I've raised do you think consumer power will ultimately be sufficient? What are your views on the potential for antitrust action in the media industry?
Do you think that this is an accurate characterization of their arguements and your position? I would be very interested in hearing you respond at more length and detail to their arguements, as I found your interview to be quite insightful.
Oh, I posted part of the interview to www.indymedia.org there was some discussion, not too insightful but I thought you might be interested.
I won't try to speak about independent media generally but what motivates me to work on Indymedia is the goal of creating a space within the media for points of view that are excluded from the mainstream. I interpret this as a project to create media democracy (in contrast to media capitalism), as such it must grow beyond the progressive/radical constituency that founded it to address the criticism that you raise. While Indymedia grew out of the protest movement and is most well known for covering protests much effort is going into creating permanent grassroots community media centers.
This is a much larger project than "stick it to the man schtick". Our goal in DC has been to empower those that don't have access to the media to be able to produce media themselves by conducting trainings. This way there isn't a "we" that covers "them" as democratic media is something that everyone should participate in.
I disagree with the idea that there is an increasing corporatization of news
Really? Do you fail to note the incredible 90+% of media is controlled by 6 companies in the US? The news outlets that are being bought by the likes of Disney and GE? That the editor of the LA Times talks about taking a bazooka to the wall between marketing and editorial? Advertisers making demands to content providers?
Documenting the corporitization of the media and the risks to society that entails is beyond the scope of this comment:) However, that Mr. Shirky can so easily dismis these concerns without even acknowledging these issues gives me pause. If you'd like to learn about the corporitization of the media I suggest you check out Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, Manufacturing Consent (documentary) by Noam Chomsky, and Rich Media, Poor Democracy by Robert McChesney.
On the topic of the media and Seattle protests, the mainstream media did not cover globalization issues at all prior to the protests. Virtually, all coverage of globalization was confined to the business pages for whom the terms of globalization were already written. There were no discussions of human rights and labor issues of globalization. Activists organizing for Seattle recognized this and saw the need to create their own media. Hence, Indymedia was born and now there are 40 spread throughout the world.
IPv6 is multicast native, thus all stacks and routers are required to support it. Multicast was added as a hack to IPv4, hardly any commercial ISP's support it for end users.
Sorry, I should have been more clear in my initial comments.
... multicast. An Internet where anyone can stream live multimedia to an unlimited number of users is the Internet that I want to be a part of. The lack of deployment of multicast on this Internet is shameful.
Interesting. I assume that this is in the world of competitive ISP's going through a CLEC though, not from the ILEC's? Within the next year or two most of those ISP's will be out of business or bought up, see DSL Woes. If the CLEC's do somehow manage to pull it out though, they will most likely get bought.
Meanwhile many DSL services offer relatively fat uplinks
Consumer grade dsl is ADSL (A for asymetric:), usually capped at 128kbps upload. Business grade SDSL with a fat upload costs quite a premium. This shows that consumer DSL providers are just as disinterested in providing fast uploads to consumers as the cable companies.
Why? Because they want to be the content delivery system for the big media producers to the consumers. Or in the case of AOL/TW they want to own the whole shebang. They did not miscalculate in designing the networks, they asked the media producers and the advertisers what they wanted. Ultimately, their goal will be to make money not by selling bandwidth to consumers, it will be the access to those consumers that they give to those same media producers and advertisers.
This is an open access issue. Pushing the ownership limits from 40% to 60% is right on schedule for ATT's recent acquisitions...
First I'll mention that over 100 comments have been posted so far and not one of them mentions the phrase "open access", nor the Consumers Union press release on the decision.
In its decision the court in part agrees with Time Warner's contention that the rules violate its First Amendment rights. I just finished reading the excellent Rich Media, Poor Democracy by Robert McChesney, which contains a chapter entitled "The New Theology of the First Amendment: Class Privilege over Democracy" devoted to this subject. McChesney criticizes the invokation of First Amendment rights to protect anti-democratic control of the media. He notes that if the purpose of the First Amendment is to protect citizens from the government's control of speech, it is unfortunate that it is being used as a weapon by corporations to do just that.
This is not a limitation of the technology, these networks were designed this way on purpose. The goal that the owners of these networks have is to use them to deliver content to consumers, not to have consumers be able to deliver content to each other. Why would AOL/Time Warner want you to be able to compete with them? They are not interested in being a provider of bandwidth, they want a delivery system for their content. They wanted a crippled network and that's what they built.
Requiring people to use the latest bloatware to access the WWW should make hardware vendors, especially memory makers, very happy. How many people run a v4 browser or an older version of an OS to squeeze another useful year out of an original pentium? Guess you're SOL.
JAMES E. BESSEN, ERIC MASKIN Harvard University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) January 2000 MIT Dept. of Economics Working Paper No. 00-01
Abstract:
How could such industries as software, semiconductors, and computers have been so innovative despite historically weak patent protection? We argue that if innovation is both sequential and complementary--as it certainly has been in those industries--competition can increase firms' future profits thus offsetting short-term dissipation of rents. A simple model also shows that in such a dynamic industry, patent protection may reduce overall innovation and social welfare. The natural experiment that occurred when patent protection was extended to software in the 1980?s provides a test of this model. Standard arguments would predict that R&D intensity and productivity should have increased among patenting firms. Consistent with our model, however, these increases did not occur. Other evidence supporting our model includes a distinctive pattern of cross-licensing in these
industries and a positive relationship between rates of innovation and firm entry.
>We want the authors to have this ability to "sell >out" but we also want the rights to keep >publishing the authors work and even keep >updating and modifying it. The viral nature of >the GPL makes using this as a motivation >impossible.
Since the author retains copyright aren't they free to offer the work under multiple licenses? If they release a work under the GPL you can make whatever additions you want on that text but they can also license it to a publisher under a non open license. Practically, the publisher would be interested in "closing" any future modifications to the work since an unrestricted version exists. So they would use you to get publicity until they can "cash in" and fork. Perhaps I'm not clear on why or what the GPL prevents.
I think the key difference between the open source
model and the traditional publishing model is restrictions on distribution.
>First, ebooks still have huge usability problems.
Ok, one embodiment isn't so hot. Removing barriers on reprinting would let the works be distrbuted at cost.
>Second, if a book is open source, what is to keep >someone from taking a book filled with
>useful, accurate information and adding in their >own take on the subject and using that for class?
How do you deal with this problem on the Internet, you go to a trusted source. Do you get your kernel from Linus or evil.com? Thankfully, the academic peer review process has this function.
>Third, I would argue that the information is >available.
Kinko's got sued in a landmark case for printing batches of articles that appeared in class syllabi. The result, higher prices to the student, more profit to the publisher via a license to the copy shop or an academic db.
Slashdot Mirror
From MSFT's annual report, $3.775 billion or 16% of total revenue. I couldn't find similar numbers on redhat's site, all there corporate info was focused on share price blather.
RedHat can't develop a major system enhancement within large portions of the OS
Redhat employs Alan Cox. Sounds like they are investing in major system enhancements.
I've been fairly pleased with Redhat initiatives like The Center for the Public Domain which funds ibiblio (was Metalab, was Sunsite) and other groups working for freedom of information. We know that free software is political and having a representative in various political processes can be helpful. So, what standards bodies is Redhat on, what kind of political lobbying does it do and what issues does it advocate in those fora?
You get 1 watt. If you use an antenna you have to turn the power down on the card to compensate for the gain.
. 4G_Band.index
FCC regs and explanation:
http://www.lns.com/papers/FCCPart15_and_the_ISM_2
You are referring to 802.11 devices that occupy the unlicensed ISM band I presume? Since its unlicensed spectrum the FCC imposes a power limit of 1 watt to keep interference under control.
MMDS occupies regulated spectrum and thus can operate at much higher power and is able to penetrate obstructions like trees.
MMDS is a broadband wireless service. Sprint and WorldComm aim to make it available in all major markets, I believe its out in SF.
M MD S.html
http://www.sprintbroadband.com/prsite/articles/
The question was about client software that would meet RMS's requirements, aka be free software. The link you gave is to streamingserver.org which mainly has info on streaming servers. It does have a two links to clients, one is to a Java API, the other is to a non-free Mac client.
a ye r/
My google and freshmeat searches turn up
http://www.kom.e-technik.tu-darmstadt.de/kom-pl
http://freshmeat.net/projects/popcorn/
both can only handle mpeg1.
Open source isn't culture imperialism, or, to acknowledge those who speak of the "GNU virus", at least not the kind I'm referring to. I was referring generally to the practice of buying a country's media infrastructure or overwhelming its native culture by flooding distribution channels with US memes (that are usually materialistic in nature). Specifically in this case, AOL/TW is getting a leg up on local competition and establishing itself as the dominant Internet player, thus being in a position to impose its hypercommercialized vision of the internet on another society.
I should have been a bit more clear to drop something like that on the discussion. Here's an
article from The Nation by Robert McChesney. Choice quote from an analyst at PaineWebber :
"What you are seeing," says Christopher Dixon, media analyst for the investment firm PaineWebber, "is the creation of a global oligopoly. It happened to the oil and automotive industries earlier this century; now it is happening to the entertainment industry."
So, I'm glad that they aren't running CE, but as rgmoore points out elsewhere in this thread, its an appliance so it doesn't really matter. I guess one of the goals of free software is to make software a commodity, so I guess this is a sign of success in that area, which is great and that I don't want to detract from. AOL/TW could turn out to be a bigger fish to fry than M$.
Intel isn't the big player in this deal, its AOL/TW. AOL did the deal with the bank for distribution, Intel was just selected to provide the hardware. Definitely a score for Intel but seeding the open market for AOL subscribers is what this deal is about.
Only 1 in 10 homes worldwide currently has a PC and room for growth in this new market is now best found not in the U.S. market, Welch said.
This is a general trend of the media giants, the US market is "mature" so there's not as much room to grow, so they go abroad. This is what's referred to when you here the phrase "US cultural imperialism".
This is particularly disturbing because its the Internet, AOL/TW is trying to corner the Internet market in a whole country. The markets that they are going to push into aren't going to have an Internet that developed in the noncommercial way that it did in the US, they are going to be commercial from the get go.
This spec puts the range of a pair of 21 dbi dishes at 25 miles.
_ ___o1.htm#xtocid191346
http://www.precept.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/pcat/ao
Its on the internet so it must be true.
Perhaps I wasn't clear. The public has certain public interest requirements in the regulated spectrum in question through the ITFS service. ITFS licensees use the regulated spectrum it shares with MDS (and now MMDS) to provide instructional television services, these licesees are nonprofit entities.
I meant to suggest that as that spectrum is being redeveloped from 1 way video delivery to 2 way broadband networking that the public retain public interest requirements in that spectrum by revisting ITFS licensing. Mr. Shirky raised the issue of a public wireless network. Since a minimum of public interest is being served by the ITFS service and much of the spectrum is being leased to Sprint and Worldcomm anyway, it seems that a better use of spectrum already set aside for public benefit would be to create such a public network.
Shirky isn't referring to services such as San Francisco's Ricochet, a wireless Internet access network provider from San Jose's Metricom. He wants to know whether citizens will be given free or subsidized wireless access, as if it were a municipal utility like water. He muses, "In New York, we have laws that give zoning variances for skyscrapers in return for creating public spaces. These public spaces could easily include 802.11b networks."
A better solution for Mr. Shirky's (slashdot interview) proposal would be to use the adjacent regulated spectrum that is being used for MMDS, a new broadband wireless service that is being rolled out.
The MMDS service occupies the same spectrum as ITFS (warning government website, design will make you cry), a service underutilized by universities to provide public service. The FCC is allowing these licenses to be snatched up by MMDS providers for gaining the licensees much ($40 according to itfs.org) and the public for which the service was created nothing.
Seems to me that putting some real public interest obligations on those licenses in the form of providing public wireless access would be a better use of that spectrum.
The "incredible" 90%+ figure is in fact incredible. I've seen this particular piece of misdirection ove and over, where "media" is redefined as "mass media", and then "mass media" is redefined as "national TV".
I'll have to dig out my copy of The Media Monopoly by Ben Bagdikian but I recall "the media" being defined rather broadly to include books, magazines, newspapers, a/v recordings as well as broadcast.
Note, by the way, that my argument is not that there is *not* corporate news. Note that my argument is not even that the Bix 6 are a result of contraction. My argument is simply that expansion of media is outstripping the contraction.
Interesting, thanks for clarifying that. Certainly it can be agreed that since the 70's technology has expanded the amount and range of media experiences available to the individual consumer. Your phrasing of this reminds me of a speech by Mark Cooper of the Consumer Federation of America at a conference (sorry doesn't have his speech), in which he talked about how at the same time that we are seeing technology expanding media potential (and thus the potential of civil society) we are seeing a retreat (or contraction) caused by coporatization of this media. This seems to be very similar to what you just stated, since you acknowledge that coporatization is a countervailing force. Dr. Cooper however saw a potential for the concentration of media in fewer and fewer hands to ultimately reverse the gains the technology has made.
McChesney in particular is pessimistic about the Web's potential to correct the media's current defects. He believes that we're in a brief window of openess that will close once the major media oligopies get their act together and team up with the communications infrastructure providers to turn the Web into a hypercommercialized interactive TV system. From this interview I gather that you don't think consumers will accept that. Consumer spending power works well in competitive markets not so well otherwise. Given the concerns about media concentration I've raised do you think consumer power will ultimately be sufficient? What are your views on the potential for antitrust action in the media industry?
Do you think that this is an accurate characterization of their arguements and your position? I would be very interested in hearing you respond at more length and detail to their arguements, as I found your interview to be quite insightful.
Oh, I posted part of the interview to www.indymedia.org there was some discussion, not too insightful but I thought you might be interested.
I won't try to speak about independent media generally but what motivates me to work on Indymedia is the goal of creating a space within the media for points of view that are excluded from the mainstream. I interpret this as a project to create media democracy (in contrast to media capitalism), as such it must grow beyond the progressive/radical constituency that founded it to address the criticism that you raise. While Indymedia grew out of the protest movement and is most well known for covering protests much effort is going into creating permanent grassroots community media centers.
This is a much larger project than "stick it to the man schtick". Our goal in DC has been to empower those that don't have access to the media to be able to produce media themselves by conducting trainings. This way there isn't a "we" that covers "them" as democratic media is something that everyone should participate in.
Is this objective? No, it doesn't try to be.
Really? Do you fail to note the incredible 90+% of media is controlled by 6 companies in the US? The news outlets that are being bought by the likes of Disney and GE? That the editor of the LA Times talks about taking a bazooka to the wall between marketing and editorial? Advertisers making demands to content providers?
Documenting the corporitization of the media and the risks to society that entails is beyond the scope of this comment :) However, that Mr. Shirky can so easily dismis these concerns without even acknowledging these issues gives me pause. If you'd like to learn about the corporitization of the media I suggest you check out Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, Manufacturing Consent (documentary) by Noam Chomsky, and Rich Media, Poor Democracy by Robert McChesney.
On the topic of the media and Seattle protests, the mainstream media did not cover globalization issues at all prior to the protests. Virtually, all coverage of globalization was confined to the business pages for whom the terms of globalization were already written. There were no discussions of human rights and labor issues of globalization. Activists organizing for Seattle recognized this and saw the need to create their own media. Hence, Indymedia was born and now there are 40 spread throughout the world.
Indymedia - become the media
IPv6 is multicast native, thus all stacks and routers are required to support it. Multicast was added as a hack to IPv4, hardly any commercial ISP's support it for end users.
Sorry, I should have been more clear in my initial comments.
... multicast. An Internet where anyone can stream live multimedia to an unlimited number of users is the Internet that I want to be a part of. The lack of deployment of multicast on this Internet is shameful.
Interesting. I assume that this is in the world of competitive ISP's going through a CLEC though, not from the ILEC's? Within the next year or two most of those ISP's will be out of business or bought up, see DSL Woes. If the CLEC's do somehow manage to pull it out though, they will most likely get bought.
Meanwhile many DSL services offer relatively fat uplinks
:), usually capped at 128kbps upload. Business grade SDSL with a fat upload costs quite a premium. This shows that consumer DSL providers are just as disinterested in providing fast uploads to consumers as the cable companies.
Consumer grade dsl is ADSL (A for asymetric
Why? Because they want to be the content delivery system for the big media producers to the consumers. Or in the case of AOL/TW they want to own the whole shebang. They did not miscalculate in designing the networks, they asked the media producers and the advertisers what they wanted. Ultimately, their goal will be to make money not by selling bandwidth to consumers, it will be the access to those consumers that they give to those same media producers and advertisers.
This is an open access issue. Pushing the ownership limits from 40% to 60% is right on schedule for ATT's recent acquisitions...
First I'll mention that over 100 comments have been posted so far and not one of them mentions the phrase "open access", nor the Consumers Union press release on the decision.
In its decision the court in part agrees with Time Warner's contention that the rules violate its First Amendment rights. I just finished reading the excellent Rich Media, Poor Democracy by Robert McChesney, which contains a chapter entitled "The New Theology of the First Amendment: Class Privilege over Democracy" devoted to this subject. McChesney criticizes the invokation of First Amendment rights to protect anti-democratic control of the media. He notes that if the purpose of the First Amendment is to protect citizens from the government's control of speech, it is unfortunate that it is being used as a weapon by corporations to do just that.
This is not a limitation of the technology, these networks were designed this way on purpose. The goal that the owners of these networks have is to use them to deliver content to consumers, not to have consumers be able to deliver content to each other. Why would AOL/Time Warner want you to be able to compete with them? They are not interested in being a provider of bandwidth, they want a delivery system for their content. They wanted a crippled network and that's what they built.
Requiring people to use the latest bloatware to access the WWW should make hardware vendors, especially memory makers, very happy. How many people run a v4 browser or an older version of an OS to squeeze another useful year out of an original pentium? Guess you're SOL.
Doesn't deal directly with open source but nods in its direction.
d =206189
Sequential Innovation, Patents, And Imitation
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_i
JAMES E. BESSEN, ERIC MASKIN Harvard University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) January 2000 MIT Dept. of Economics Working Paper No. 00-01
Abstract:
How could such industries as software, semiconductors, and computers have been so innovative despite historically weak patent protection? We argue that if innovation is both sequential and complementary--as it certainly has been in those industries--competition can increase firms' future profits thus offsetting short-term dissipation of rents. A simple model also shows that in such a dynamic industry, patent protection may reduce overall innovation and social welfare. The natural experiment that occurred when patent protection was extended to software in the 1980?s provides a test of this model. Standard arguments would predict that R&D intensity and productivity should have increased among patenting firms. Consistent with our model, however, these increases did not occur. Other evidence supporting our model includes a distinctive pattern of cross-licensing in these
industries and a positive relationship between rates of innovation and firm entry.
>We want the authors to have this ability to "sell >out" but we also want the rights to keep >publishing the authors work and even keep >updating and modifying it. The viral nature of >the GPL makes using this as a motivation >impossible.
Since the author retains copyright aren't they free to offer the work under multiple licenses? If they release a work under the GPL you can make whatever additions you want on that text but they can also license it to a publisher under a non open license. Practically, the publisher would be interested in "closing" any future modifications to the work since an unrestricted version exists. So they would use you to get publicity until they can "cash in" and fork. Perhaps I'm not clear on why or what the GPL prevents.
I think the key difference between the open source
model and the traditional publishing model is restrictions on distribution.
>First, ebooks still have huge usability problems.
Ok, one embodiment isn't so hot. Removing barriers on reprinting would let the works be distrbuted at cost.
>Second, if a book is open source, what is to keep >someone from taking a book filled with
>useful, accurate information and adding in their >own take on the subject and using that for class?
How do you deal with this problem on the Internet, you go to a trusted source. Do you get your kernel from Linus or evil.com? Thankfully, the academic peer review process has this function.
>Third, I would argue that the information is >available.
Kinko's got sued in a landmark case for printing batches of articles that appeared in class syllabi. The result, higher prices to the student, more profit to the publisher via a license to the copy shop or an academic db.