The LINX debacle affirms the idea that *reputation*, above and beyond human *attention*, is the chief currency in this idea economy. Clearly LinuxOne is getting attention, but of a bitter sort. (then again, press is often measured by quantity, not quality.)
Maybe Dr. Chiou's LINX will do little damage to Linux' reputation. But if he achieves his purpose, even slightly, many might follow suit. Snowball. After all, the "world domination" market is immense, comprising *billions* of newbies. The barrier to entry, as LINX proves, barely exists. Maybe "world partnership" would have been smarter.
Bernardo Huberman concludes that the bigger a system is, the more individuals within it will poach, simply because they can get away with it. Guilt free. The bigger Linux gets, (the way it's currently being financed), the more it may suffer infestation by parasites.
"Money" wants one thing: to maximize its return with minimal effort, and limited liability. "It goes where it's wanted, and stays where it's cared for." Gold rules. The rich get richer, and the poor get, uh.. motivation to get rich.. (and so on, until we reboot "money")
Meanwhile, how do we use yesterday's money to trade today's free ideas? How does open source get monetized? Are there choices?
Are "property"-centered IPO's and stockholder "ownership" the *ideal* way to finance trade in free ideas? Are they the *fairest* of possible arrangements? Are they the *only* kind of financial relationships imaginable? Maybe not.
Could the Open Source principle of "common ownership" conceivably adapt to the structure of a "business relationship"?
Maybe so. "Common ownership" is a key organizing principle of one of the most successful enterprises in history, which incidentally has plenty to do with software, entrepreneurial freedom, ingenuity, trade, globalization and money itself..
VISA defined "ownership" as a nontransferable *right* to participate, and an *obligation* to abide by community-defined terms. Legally, it was structured as a non-stock, for-profit membership corporation. So it can't be bought, sold, traded or raided. No pump, no dump. VISA has grown 20-50%, compounding annually, for over 30 years, past boom, bubble, bear and bust: $1,400,000,000,000 (trillion) in 1998 sales.
Dee Hock, who founded this semi-choard, believes that if "ownership" had been extended to *all* participants (including merchants and cardholders), then it would be *four times* more successful today. It would be truly chaordic.
(So does "common ownership" always mean "Communism"? Maybe not. Meanwhile, das Capital floods into Linux, which is rooted in the freaking GPL.. wierd. Maybe money follows ingenuity, regardless of ideology..)
Why do open licenses like the GPL so attract that most valuable resource, human ingenuity? Common ownership? Promotion of sharing? Trade rooted in ethics? Relief from pricey legal haggling? Rebellion? Civil disobedience? Cooperative advantage? Creative liberty? Maybe it boils down to freedom from restrictions.
"Freedom"? Are you *free* to scream "fire" in a crowded house or to punch the tip of my nose? Kinda.. Dee Hock (after Lao Tzu) claims that in reality, "everything is its opposite". Freedom is a fruit of self-restraint. By forced sharing, the GPL righteously claims to be more "free" than BSD. BSD rabidly disagrees. Considering the LinuxONE problem at hand, is the "GPV" dispute relevant?
Dr. Chiou and company seem to be breaking an *unwritten* community contract. He's free to do so. Any surprise at all, considering recent capital flows to RHAT and LNUX? To equitably and successfully enable monetized, fair, reputable and trustworthy trade in free ideas, maybe alternative contracts (open licenses) need to be written and tried.
No, not like the SCSL (a legal document that claims to create a "chaord". Dubious. Sun is infected with the "responsibility-to-stockholder" virus, which makes it difficult to truly extend equitable ownership to all participants.)
Who knows? What if, in the beginning, Linus added a few fairness enhancing restrictions to the GPL:
Call this OS anything you want, but please include the name "linux" in whatever you call it.
Please claim to your free subdomain (reputation) in our community-owned, mother-of-all-intranets at http://our.linux.org/dns (eg: va.linux.org = valinux.com etc)
Let's chaorganize ourselves to free our idea exchange, while forging a commercial agreement to immunize ourselves from free-riders like Dr. Chiou.. This process might take us a year..
Maybe the resulting agreement would be as simple as "our free software is GPL, but if you have yet to agree to our terms, you are not yet free to call it "Linux" nor free to pretend that you are a Penguin. (no fraud, please) You are free to join us if you choose to at http://our.linux.org/agreement/LPL
Reputation management? What's in a name? Giving credit where credit is due? Patent and Copyright "properties" may perpetuate outdated economic models of scarcity, but Trademarks? Might they grow more valuable as info gluts?
What if the idea that *no one owns linux* switched to the idea that *we own linux*? What if we agreed to restrict abuse of "our" name, (and the values it represents)? Would [insert project "x", eg "linux"] then be better cared for?
These are just questions from an outsider looking in. Point is, a *truly* chaordic (distributed ownership, equitable rewards) community license to develop/use a free software system might enhance the *trust* between all participants, particularly when money enters the mix.
Maybe such an agreement could not be strictly defined as "Free" or "Open Source", (due to the tradename requirement/url verification), but maybe some resulting immunity to commercial parasites is worth that price. Maybe such an agreement could be called "Open Code" (for software *and* organizational code.)
Whatever.. open principles make better software, and they oughta extend to embrace business structures and practices.. which seems like it could happen with this chaordic stuff.. (chaorganization, coincidentally, requires a fundamental reconception of "ownership")
Why beware of VC money? It typically wants us to "acquire" customers, in hopes that shareholders will want to "own" a piece of us. Don't buy it! Pop that bubble! Customers are not "property", and neither are we.
"Ownership" in the chaordic sense will extend freedom (and *trust*) farther faster.
If that's our purpose, how can we then raise enough cash to incorporate our ideas into legal fictions (businesses) which may serve to help us reputably trade our ingenuity? Savings. Loans. Credit Cards. VC royalty financing. URL Bonds? Membership fees. Service contracts. Ad revenues. "Free" products for sale. Faith. Whatever it takes.. but don't sell off a single limb, not even a single digit. Extend ownership to customers, not stock-holders. Serve people. It will prove more profitable.
are contracts/licenses copyrightable?
on
Hole in GNU GPL?
·
· Score: 1
Patent filings are not copyrightable. SEC filings don't appear to be copyrightable (RHAT/LINX). Contracts/licenses are probably not "protectable" by copyright. (Think of the hairball that would result if they were!)
Does anyone have the definitive answer to this? Can, by law, the GPL be modified (if renamed)?
btw--/. needs a full-time lawyer to clear up our legal confusions.. such an index [slashdot.org/law] would get lots of traffic and sharpen the signal here..
The struggle to survive continues: by 2002, aol/twx/viacom/cbs merges with citi/travelers, consolidating access/content/financial services into an ubermonster that "serves you better". In 2003, it merges with merke/ciba-giegy, adding medication to mass hypnosis, creating unprecedented pocket picking opportunities.. for relatively few.. for the short run.
In the long haul, shareholder managed mediocracies like these will implode. Their urge to command and control the market will win fewer and fewer hearts. More cooperative competitors will route around the sword of the central censor. Wake up and smell the tsunami.
Metcalfe's Law describes exponentially increasing returns as more nodes connect to a network. Hence, AOL MSN etc clobber one another to acquire customers, to aggregate eyeballs, with one simple aim: sell them. Customers defect, exploiting titanic price wars. The price for customer acquisition skyrockets. Investors hoping to cash in on tomorrow's loyal customer might just have their bubble popped one of these days..
Long term loyalty can't be bought. And King Customer grows more powerful by the day. This will profoundly change all business relationships in the free trade of meaningful ideas.
Does a customer's capacity to store information quadruple every three years? Gilder's Law says there will be 27 times more pipe to share information every three years. So in ten years, TiVo nodes might store 75 times more info, but have 60,000 times the capacity to exchange it, and do so transnationally. Try to regulate it. Go ahead, hire more lawyers.
What is the technology telling us? Decentralization is bad news for vertically integrated cash registers. It's good news for reintermediators, and creators who avoid selling ownership out to ubercorps. Great news for chaorganized traders.
Shared ownership in client/server transaction is where it's at. ImagineRadio kinda got it, until they sold out to Viacom. Aolosaurus doesn't get it at all.
propagate chaordic organization.. distribute equitable ownership to *all*/. participants, (in the form of non-transferable right of participation.)
2. open source
practice the preach, perhaps with a modified BSD/GPL requesting (requiring?) attribution, link.
3. decentralize
a. grant users subdomains within slashdot.com allowing us to discuss [rejected] topics, and distill signal from noise within [accepted] topics. (open our data to user recombination, including alternative graphic "skin" overlays.)
b. insert topic directories allowing users to distill and share opinions on daily topics, ie: GPLvBSD, patents, namespace/trademarks, privacy/accountability, etc. ie: http://user1.slashdot.com/re/GPLvBSD (save us time, let us avoid repetition and share *distilled* conclusion/opinions)
c. reboot karma to transcend groupthink
d. invite languages other than the english
4. monetize
a. find ways to fairly direct revenue streams to all participants who contribute value to slashdot.com
b. let us openly measure logs to learn whose reputations* gather whose *attention*
c. create a/. community currency, fully fungible with any other, like saxas, but open source, (secure)
d. have your suits propose licensing guidelines allowing paid (fairly shared) republishing of user commentary in other channels
The only problem we have with patents today is that the USPTO is giving them out too easily, trivializing the real value of the patent process.
another problem might include the fact that an owner of a patent monopoly can choose to deny anyone else access to the invention, or set unfair terms.. might compulsory licensing alleviate the problem?
Why worry about the person of 1999? 1999 is already over. Whose vision is most important for the year 2000 and onward? Whose concept of community, ownership, collaboration, innovation and trade will prove most insightful, ethical and useful? DeeHock.
In most of the world, there are marketplaces or bazaars where you go to buy stuff. If something looks useful, you ask the going price. The seller quotes kinda high, so you walk away.. Then the seller says, "well, how much can you pay?" The haggling begins, and in the end, you name your price, and the seller takes it or leaves it. There's millennia of "art" prior to this preposterous claim.. Adding an inhumane interface to it adds insult to injury..
Hopefully these gorillas will serious damage to each other and prove to those with common sense that ideas, especially age-old practices, are ill-defined as "property..
Even if your company neither directly nor indirectly employs infringing technology in its business, you could potentially still be sued for inducement to infringe merely for helping to sell or promote the products or services of a company that does so infringe. Given that the Internet is nothing if not a vast bazaar of hyperlinked, cross-promotional Web sites, this could be a problem of staggering proportions.
It remains unclear precisely how important patents will ultimately prove to be in shaping the dynamics of competition on the Net. What can be said with absolute assurance, however, is that patent-driven business wars are soon going to be commonplace on the Net.
American system has made lawyers become 'a need'. Isn't that scary!?
yes, it's scary! Lawyers love the concept of "intellectual property" as it vastly expands their market. The world looks to America as the shining example of prosperity, and is likely to adapt the litigation way of life. This means highly paid "protection" rackets lock out the un-rich from access to this system. But maybe it'll cause a backlash. Consider:
Within 10 years, computers will be 64 times more affordable.. Bandwidth will be 20,000 times more affordable.. It means less rich people will have far more access.. The Chinese are already leapfrogging into wireless.. The more dynamic and accessible information becomes, the less likely territorial jurisdictions will apply. Things are gonna change...
Maybe it will prove far more valuable to focus on "intellectual propogation" ethics (or even laws for global ecommerce), so the untapped potential of all kinds of currently underpriviledged people can participate.
What we need are principle-centered people like RMS to hire lawyers to make documents that protect rather than violate our freedom to learn and trade. (Lawyers aren't at all useless.. it's how business people use them that give them such a bad name:)
consider, after all, the impact of the legal document known as the GPL..
I hope you're right, but are you sure? What about the company zerox freaking out about people xeroxing or making xeroxes, when they should be saying "make xerox copies"?
(i hope you're right because trademark law is designed for things, and these days action is what's valuable..)
suggest someone (a/. moderator, prehaps) will assemble all of the listed lawyers (with their URLs, Price-Tags, Locations and even Reviews by Costumers) into a handy HTML that could be easily accessed in case of need.
Lots of action like this would really help this website extract sharper signals from noise (that's the point of moderation, right?)
another idea would be to give us/. users subdomains or directories so we could filter and save what's meaningful to us individually, and be able check out what signals other lusers extract from this snowballing clusterfsck of textual intercourse..
It's ironic that so many people here defend freedom in words, but act up in a big hissy snit when when "their" words are freely used. Who cares at this point and in this context if ideas are "fixed in a tangible medium" and subject to copyright protection by the US Congress, Courts, and Armed Forces? Attribution would be nice, but can lead to unmanagably obnoxious advertising, right? Why perpetuate the legal fictions and try to assert property rights? It's a losing battle. Wanna consult your lawyer every time you think a thought? Like they say, what goes around, comes around..
Who knows how much NATO spent to force Milosevic out of Kosovo? Billion$, right? Wouldn't that money (or even a small part of it) have been far more effectively invested in providing decentralized communications access to the *people* in Kosovo/Serbia? Likewise in Iraq? Fighting fire with fire causes a tit-for-tat vicious spiral of suffering and resentment. Better douse it with water. "Bombing" civilians with uncensored bits will empower people to topple their oppresive despots better, cheaper, faster.
As it stands, NATO taxpayer dollars/euros now finance isolation policies that kill thousands of children every month, in the case of Iraq, from sewage-born infestation, malnutrition, exposure etc. Slow and painful. The US domestic propoganda machine ignores this, prefering to focus tv attention on finger wagging at that bad-boy "Sadaam" and his "weapons of mass destruction".
But asking the doublespeaking largest-arms-dealer-in-the-world named Uncle Sam to demostrate real decency may be unrealistic, in light of his past behavior. Still, you gotta thank Arpanet for the Internet:)
It may be the only solution, unless you want to be a cog in a wheel that spins only to maximize the ROI for shareholders and their greedy values. Increasingly, corporations are getting hip to ownership as motivator, and so offer employees teensy tiny shares of stock. Better than nothing. But when you form a company to employ yourself, be sure to consider alternative structures for incorporation that distribute ownership equitably among all participants.
Hunger in the RealWorld(tm)?
on
NetSlaves
·
· Score: 1
10%? 1%? What real world are you talking about? The Internet is global. Many more than 10% of today's kids are quite hungry right this second. Think that has little to do with programming jobs? Fast foward: 3 billion people will have 'net access in ten short years, including a few of the hungry kids who don't die of starvation this year. Lots of hungry people will be competing for "jobs" in an idea economy. Welcome to Bangalore. Welcome to the Real(tm) RealWorld(tm).
Interesting dilemma: we need laws (restrictions) "to protect" our freedoms.
RMS suggests calls "protection" a propoganda term which views the situation from the point of view of the person or company that owns the monopoly, rather than the millions of others who are restricted by it. Yet he quite effectively protects software freedoms, and wields his GPL as a powerful tool to enforce such protections. Millions of users are affected by his powerful copylefts. Billions will be within a decade. (It's probably a very good thing, but it's a complex thing.. it's a juicy dilemma:)
He suggests we avoid the words "intellectual property" because they fail to distinguish between copyright and patent law. IMO, patent and copyright law are quite similar in that both legalize an artificial scarcity. Temporary monopolies granted by such laws intend to motivate "advancement of the useful arts" by permitting "owners" of such monopolies restrict uses thereof, as in the case of copyright owners "licensing" use of code.
"Copyleft" may advance useful arts much faster by requiring the act of sharing, and thus restricts the reinvention of wheels. If you look at Linux growth, you could might even call the GPL a powerful capitalist tool. It frees trade:)
Oops! Call it "GNU/Linux" growth..
Trademark Law, OTOH, is a different animal. It doesn't legalize fictional scarcity, rather it identifies a badge or brand or reputation. It helps to give credit where credit is due, supports fair attribution, and grows increasingly valuable as info gluts in growing abundance. Trademarks are a foundation for Trust, the most powerful free trade tool of all.
A weakness of the GPL may be that it doesn't provide for fair attribution. (See Linux vs GNU/Linux) How to work around it without "obnoxious advertising"? [vague idea: maybe attribution can be cross-licensed or accountably arranged between subdomains under root URLs..]Who knows?
"Property"? Outdated word. Ideas aren't things, they're actions. Trade is more about relationships than ownership. Partnership more than domination. What's a good replacement name for "Intellectual Property" Laws? Who knows? Idea Law? Trust Law? "Ethics"? "Accountability"?
In the end, IMO, disclosure, accountability and reputation management will be the most free and powerful means to inhibit parasitic free-riders in the trade of ideas.
If this free-speech-vs-free-beer deficiency in the English language gets tiresome to explain again and again, why not move on to the word "freed"? As far as I can tell, once code is GPL'd, it is freed, liberated, opened and can't return to closed proprietary secrecy and hiding. Done deal. Past tense. "Freed Software". In the future, you can still charge money for it, or you can give the Freed Software away for free.
m-w: FREE implies a usually permanent removal from whatever binds, confines, entangles, or oppresses [FREED the animals from their cages]
Given the rate of accelerating change, this sounds like a low-priority text, as it doesn't address the more important shift in business ownership/relationship. Customers are empowered by technology, and ultimately they will demand to be part "owners" in their businesses. After all, customers provide attention, info, and cash. People who can afford to buy stock in Amazon, E-bay, Yahoo, AOL etc are already "owning" a piece of the action, and thus further motivated to trade in "their" channels.
Still, the current IPO model seems like a gigantic (and breakable) chain of greedy fools. Intelligence will route around it, using the far more powerful "chaordic" model envisioned by Dee Hock and partly implemented by Visa. (a huge info-biz w/ 30 yrs experience growing 20% annually). Visa defines "ownership" as non-transferable "right to participate". Participants cooperate and compete for relationships, not ownership. The chaordic model is a decentralized magnet for the greatest resouce of all: human ingenuity.
Regarding "efficiency".. it's probably over-rated: "As information and intelligence become the domain of computers, society will place new value on the one human ability that can't be automated: emotion. Imagination, myth, ritual -- the language of emotion -- will affect everything from our purchasing decisions to how well we work with others.. ideas like quality, efficiency, and reliability will no longer sell products."
How well we work with others (trade) has a lot more to do with "relationship" than "ownership".
Yes. It's clear Real knew exactly what it was doing, took a calculated risk, had the patch prepared well in advance, and probably considers this episode a successful advance of its "learning ecosystem".
If you've read about Rob Glaser (Real CEO), you've learned he's spawn from the M$ culture, and is eager to reproduce it on his own by a.)gaining ubiquity and b.)leveraging proprietary advantage. He's not to be trusted. But it's hard to trust many shareholder-owned corporate entities these days. And trust is the basis of loyalty, trade, and cooperative advantage.
In the end, (and this may sound a little outrageous), any company that operates on an "us" (owners) vs. "them" (customers) basis, sneaking around, seeing what they can get away with, etc. is doomed. The corporation that can figure out how to include customers in the equity equation will thrive by generating the most trust (trade). (After all, customers provide attention, cash flow, preferences data, etc.) Sound crazy? Well, it's what Dee Hock envisioned for Visa.. He guessed Visa would be 4 times more powerful today if merchants and cardholders shared ownership..
Also.. thank god the w3 is challenging the p3p patent.. the more we individuals can control our "own" privacy, the less we'll be under the thumb of big government and big money, the more accountability will free the flow of our info, and the more trust and trade there'll be online.
Now you have a many-to-many relationship, although the dynamics of communication and it's content have not changed
um.. maybe the fax machine had a little something to do with the fall of a certain wall in Berlin, and a certain big bad bear that built it? Many-to-many relationships enabled by networked info machines distinctly changes the both dynamic of communication and the content carried by it.
If this evident fax effect serves as a precedent, society is likely adapt to the Internet, rather than the other way around. Moore's Law will let you buy today's laptop in 2010 for $15-$20, and it will also be a cel phone: Gilder's Law, (bandwidth triples yearly to 2025) suggests that broadband duplex communication will cost pennies or even be free. Metcalf's Law, (the power of a network is the square of its nodes) will empower billions of people to trade learning and tap human ingenuity like never before. The party hasn't even started..
Roblimo wonders if all the intelligence focused on 'net wouldn't be better focused on eliminating poverty. Well, there's probably no better tool than the 'net to do this: when it costs ten bucks for an access device and the connect fee is negligable, earning only $350 a year won't be such a barrier to entry. Informed populations won't be so easily kept under despotic thumbs. And we're likely to see globally-connected leap-froggin' knowledge workers undercut high wages paid in the developed world. It's already happening in places like Bangalore.
Sure, it's we the people that make the changes.. but how easily can we make them without decentralized electronic communications?
If you believe in free exchange of ideas and resist censorship of your opinions and cultural expressions, then opening the source code for "money" is well worth talking about.
Tax evasion might be parasitic, but so might governmental policies taxing the creation rather than consumption of value. Maybe you don't like funding the "war on drugs" or corporate welfare for a booming prison industry either. Maybe you believe some forms of "intellectual property" are unethical and unfair barriers to fair trade. Maybe you think bombarding people with access to information instead of deadly bombs (iraq, kosovo) might engender far more liberty and justice for all. You might then look for alternative systems to trade your valuables.
As Hobbex says here, most of today's "offshore" alternatives are in reality subject to forceful persuasion. But unprecedented, dynamic, distributed, smart, encrypted exchange mediums could redefine "borders" and free a great deal of trade in ideas..
..unsustainable! Intelligence is likely route around it.. Vince Cate has a lot of info on this overall thread:
"The IRS says that a US citizen who is out of the country for 330 days or more of the year does not owe any taxes on his first $70,000 earned outside the country. Clearly, you want to incorporate your business in some tax haven country and pay yourself less than $70,000 per year. By doing this, you can then travel around as a "PT" and legally avoid taxes."
"The consumer gets the best deal in terms of products, service, and price when there is competition. If people move freely between countries, governments that do not provide good service at a reasonable price will loose people to those that do. Countries will start to compete for people, or they will loose people. This will make governments provide better services with less taxes. Governments will have to be more efficient."
Well, how many TVs are in China today? Asia? ROW? How much do TVs cost users today?
My nifty $1000 sony vaio today will cost you $15 bucks in 2010. Spread easy payments over 3 years! DSL today connects me to you for $50 bucks a month. 2010 it'll cost three cents a year. $5 or 10 bucks a year seems like affordable access, even if you make only $350 bucks a year. Either refute Gilder's law, or do the math. Moore's law is way over-rated.
Wireless bandwith doubles every 9 months. The Chinese cel phone market (wireless) is alreadly exploding today in 1999. Extrapolate. How smart a device will $100 buy in 2010? $10? How many Chinese will connect? 400 million by 2010? 2015? 2020? (And what if rural access spreads with agents like Grameen?) What year do *you* predict that more chinese will be online than us citizens are alive?
and again, btw: top level domains should be linguistic, non militaristic.
Slashdot Mirror
The LINX debacle affirms the idea that *reputation*, above and beyond human *attention*, is the chief currency in this idea economy. Clearly LinuxOne is getting attention, but of a bitter sort. (then again, press is often measured by quantity, not quality.)
Maybe Dr. Chiou's LINX will do little damage to Linux' reputation. But if he achieves his purpose, even slightly, many might follow suit. Snowball. After all, the "world domination" market is immense, comprising *billions* of newbies. The barrier to entry, as LINX proves, barely exists. Maybe "world partnership" would have been smarter.
Bernardo Huberman concludes that the bigger a system is, the more individuals within it will poach, simply because they can get away with it. Guilt free. The bigger Linux gets, (the way it's currently being financed), the more it may suffer infestation by parasites.
"Money" wants one thing: to maximize its return with minimal effort, and limited liability. "It goes where it's wanted, and stays where it's cared for." Gold rules. The rich get richer, and the poor get, uh.. motivation to get rich.. (and so on, until we reboot "money")
Meanwhile, how do we use yesterday's money to trade today's free ideas? How does open source get monetized? Are there choices?
Are "property"-centered IPO's and stockholder "ownership" the *ideal* way to finance trade in free ideas? Are they the *fairest* of possible arrangements? Are they the *only* kind of financial relationships imaginable? Maybe not.
Could the Open Source principle of "common ownership" conceivably adapt to the structure of a "business relationship"?
Maybe so. "Common ownership" is a key organizing principle of one of the most successful enterprises in history, which incidentally has plenty to do with software, entrepreneurial freedom, ingenuity, trade, globalization and money itself..
VISA defined "ownership" as a nontransferable *right* to participate, and an *obligation* to abide by community-defined terms. Legally, it was structured as a non-stock, for-profit membership corporation. So it can't be bought, sold, traded or raided. No pump, no dump. VISA has grown 20-50%, compounding annually, for over 30 years, past boom, bubble, bear and bust: $1,400,000,000,000 (trillion) in 1998 sales.
Dee Hock, who founded this semi-choard, believes that if "ownership" had been extended to *all* participants (including merchants and cardholders), then it would be *four times* more successful today. It would be truly chaordic.
(So does "common ownership" always mean "Communism"? Maybe not. Meanwhile, das Capital floods into Linux, which is rooted in the freaking GPL.. wierd. Maybe money follows ingenuity, regardless of ideology..)
Why do open licenses like the GPL so attract that most valuable resource, human ingenuity? Common ownership? Promotion of sharing? Trade rooted in ethics? Relief from pricey legal haggling? Rebellion? Civil disobedience? Cooperative advantage? Creative liberty? Maybe it boils down to freedom from restrictions.
"Freedom"? Are you *free* to scream "fire" in a crowded house or to punch the tip of my nose? Kinda.. Dee Hock (after Lao Tzu) claims that in reality, "everything is its opposite". Freedom is a fruit of self-restraint. By forced sharing, the GPL righteously claims to be more "free" than BSD. BSD rabidly disagrees. Considering the LinuxONE problem at hand, is the "GPV" dispute relevant?
Dr. Chiou and company seem to be breaking an *unwritten* community contract. He's free to do so. Any surprise at all, considering recent capital flows to RHAT and LNUX? To equitably and successfully enable monetized, fair, reputable and trustworthy trade in free ideas, maybe alternative contracts (open licenses) need to be written and tried.
No, not like the SCSL (a legal document that claims to create a "chaord". Dubious. Sun is infected with the "responsibility-to-stockholder" virus, which makes it difficult to truly extend equitable ownership to all participants.)
Who knows? What if, in the beginning, Linus added a few fairness enhancing restrictions to the GPL:
- Call this OS anything you want, but please include the name "linux" in whatever you call it.
- Please claim to your free subdomain (reputation) in our community-owned, mother-of-all-intranets at http://our.linux.org/dns (eg: va.linux.org = valinux.com etc)
- Let's chaorganize ourselves to free our idea exchange, while forging a commercial agreement to immunize ourselves from free-riders like Dr. Chiou.. This process might take us a year..
Maybe the resulting agreement would be as simple as "our free software is GPL, but if you have yet to agree to our terms, you are not yet free to call it "Linux" nor free to pretend that you are a Penguin. (no fraud, please) You are free to join us if you choose to at http://our.linux.org/agreement/LPLReputation management? What's in a name? Giving credit where credit is due? Patent and Copyright "properties" may perpetuate outdated economic models of scarcity, but Trademarks? Might they grow more valuable as info gluts?
What if the idea that *no one owns linux* switched to the idea that *we own linux*? What if we agreed to restrict abuse of "our" name, (and the values it represents)? Would [insert project "x", eg "linux"] then be better cared for?
These are just questions from an outsider looking in. Point is, a *truly* chaordic (distributed ownership, equitable rewards) community license to develop/use a free software system might enhance the *trust* between all participants, particularly when money enters the mix.
Maybe such an agreement could not be strictly defined as "Free" or "Open Source", (due to the tradename requirement/url verification), but maybe some resulting immunity to commercial parasites is worth that price. Maybe such an agreement could be called "Open Code" (for software *and* organizational code.)
Whatever.. open principles make better software, and they oughta extend to embrace business structures and practices.. which seems like it could happen with this chaordic stuff.. (chaorganization, coincidentally, requires a fundamental reconception of "ownership")
Why beware of VC money? It typically wants us to "acquire" customers, in hopes that shareholders will want to "own" a piece of us. Don't buy it! Pop that bubble! Customers are not "property", and neither are we.
"Ownership" in the chaordic sense will extend freedom (and *trust*) farther faster.
If that's our purpose, how can we then raise enough cash to incorporate our ideas into legal fictions (businesses) which may serve to help us reputably trade our ingenuity? Savings. Loans. Credit Cards. VC royalty financing. URL Bonds? Membership fees. Service contracts. Ad revenues. "Free" products for sale. Faith. Whatever it takes.. but don't sell off a single limb, not even a single digit. Extend ownership to customers, not stock-holders. Serve people. It will prove more profitable.
chaorganize!
[sources: LINX . "attEnTiOn"-NoT . StiG . BiOnOMiCs . CHaOs-is-G00D . PaRtneRsHiP . FrEELoAdiNG . MoNeY . ComMuNiTy-CuRReNcY . iNteLLeCtuAL-VaLuE . RHaT-IpO . AddApT . CHaRacTeRIStiCs-o-ChaORgAniZATiOn . ViSA . DeE-HoCK . CoMMiE-UniTy? . GpL=BiG-BuCk$?? . MiNDcRaFTiNg . EcOnOmY-oF-iDeAs . ETHiCs-of-iP . ScSL . CoOpeRaTiVe-adVaNtaGe . CHaOrDiC-PrOCeSs . wHaT'sa-NaMe? . CrEdiT-DuE? . OPEN-CoDE . ETHiCs
only a question
Patent filings are not copyrightable. SEC filings don't appear to be copyrightable (RHAT/LINX). Contracts/licenses are probably not "protectable" by copyright. (Think of the hairball that would result if they were!)
/. needs a full-time lawyer to clear up our legal confusions.. such an index [slashdot.org/law] would get lots of traffic and sharpen the signal here..
Does anyone have the definitive answer to this? Can, by law, the GPL be modified (if renamed)?
btw--
The struggle to survive continues: by 2002, aol/twx/viacom/cbs merges with citi/travelers, consolidating access/content/financial services into an ubermonster that "serves you better". In 2003, it merges with merke/ciba-giegy, adding medication to mass hypnosis, creating unprecedented pocket picking opportunities.. for relatively few.. for the short run.
In the long haul, shareholder managed mediocracies like these will implode. Their urge to command and control the market will win fewer and fewer hearts. More cooperative competitors will route around the sword of the central censor. Wake up and smell the tsunami.
Metcalfe's Law describes exponentially increasing returns as more nodes connect to a network. Hence, AOL MSN etc clobber one another to acquire customers, to aggregate eyeballs, with one simple aim: sell them. Customers defect, exploiting titanic price wars. The price for customer acquisition skyrockets. Investors hoping to cash in on tomorrow's loyal customer might just have their bubble popped one of these days..
Long term loyalty can't be bought. And King Customer grows more powerful by the day. This will profoundly change all business relationships in the free trade of meaningful ideas.
Does a customer's capacity to store information quadruple every three years? Gilder's Law says there will be 27 times more pipe to share information every three years. So in ten years, TiVo nodes might store 75 times more info, but have 60,000 times the capacity to exchange it, and do so transnationally. Try to regulate it. Go ahead, hire more lawyers.
What is the technology telling us? Decentralization is bad news for vertically integrated cash registers. It's good news for reintermediators, and creators who avoid selling ownership out to ubercorps. Great news for chaorganized traders.
Shared ownership in client/server transaction is where it's at. ImagineRadio kinda got it, until they sold out to Viacom. Aolosaurus doesn't get it at all.
1. chaorganize
/. participants, (in the form of non-transferable right of participation.)
://user1.slashdot.com/re/GPLvBSD (save us time, let us avoid repetition and share *distilled* conclusion/opinions)
/. community currency, fully fungible with any other, like saxas, but open source, (secure)
propagate chaordic organization.. distribute equitable ownership to *all*
2. open source
practice the preach, perhaps with a modified BSD/GPL requesting (requiring?) attribution, link.
3. decentralize
a. grant users subdomains within slashdot.com allowing us to discuss [rejected] topics, and distill signal from noise within [accepted] topics. (open our data to user recombination, including alternative graphic "skin" overlays.)
b. insert topic directories allowing users to distill and share opinions on daily topics, ie: GPLvBSD, patents, namespace/trademarks, privacy/accountability, etc. ie: http
c. reboot karma to transcend groupthink
d. invite languages other than the english
4. monetize
a. find ways to fairly direct revenue streams to all participants who contribute value to slashdot.com
b. let us openly measure logs to learn whose reputations* gather whose *attention*
c. create a
d. have your suits propose licensing guidelines allowing paid (fairly shared) republishing of user commentary in other channels
comments?
The only problem we have with patents today is that the USPTO is giving them out too easily, trivializing the real value of the patent process.
another problem might include the fact that an owner of a patent monopoly can choose to deny anyone else access to the invention, or set unfair terms.. might compulsory licensing alleviate the problem?
Why worry about the person of 1999? 1999 is already over. Whose vision is most important for the year 2000 and onward? Whose concept of community, ownership, collaboration, innovation and trade will prove most insightful, ethical and useful? Dee Hock.
In most of the world, there are marketplaces or bazaars where you go to buy stuff. If something looks useful, you ask the going price. The seller quotes kinda high, so you walk away.. Then the seller says, "well, how much can you pay?" The haggling begins, and in the end, you name your price, and the seller takes it or leaves it. There's millennia of "art" prior to this preposterous claim.. Adding an inhumane interface to it adds insult to injury..
Hopefully these gorillas will serious damage to each other and prove to those with common sense that ideas, especially age-old practices, are ill-defined as "property..
btw.. upside has a related st ory:
Even if your company neither directly nor indirectly employs infringing technology in its business, you could potentially still be sued for inducement to infringe merely for helping to sell or promote the products or services of a company that does so infringe. Given that the Internet is nothing if not a vast bazaar of hyperlinked, cross-promotional Web sites, this could be a problem of staggering proportions.
It remains unclear precisely how important patents will ultimately prove to be in shaping the dynamics of competition on the Net. What can be said with absolute assurance, however, is that patent-driven business wars are soon going to be commonplace on the Net.
American system has made lawyers become 'a need'. Isn't that scary!?
yes, it's scary! Lawyers love the concept of "intellectual property" as it vastly expands their market. The world looks to America as the shining example of prosperity, and is likely to adapt the litigation way of life. This means highly paid "protection" rackets lock out the un-rich from access to this system. But maybe it'll cause a backlash. Consider:
Within 10 years, computers will be 64 times more affordable.. Bandwidth will be 20,000 times more affordable.. It means less rich people will have far more access.. The Chinese are already leapfrogging into wireless.. The more dynamic and accessible information becomes, the less likely territorial jurisdictions will apply. Things are gonna change...
Maybe it will prove far more valuable to focus on "intellectual propogation" ethics (or even laws for global ecommerce), so the untapped potential of all kinds of currently underpriviledged people can participate.
What we need are principle-centered people like RMS to hire lawyers to make documents that protect rather than violate our freedom to learn and trade. (Lawyers aren't at all useless.. it's how business people use them that give them such a bad name:)
consider, after all, the impact of the legal document known as the GPL..
only the pronoid survive..
I hope you're right, but are you sure? What about the company zerox freaking out about people xeroxing or making xeroxes, when they should be saying "make xerox copies"?
(i hope you're right because trademark law is designed for things, and these days action is what's valuable..)
suggest someone (a /. moderator, prehaps) will assemble all of the listed lawyers (with their URLs, Price-Tags, Locations and even Reviews by Costumers) into a handy HTML that could be easily accessed in case of need.
/. users subdomains or directories so we could filter and save what's meaningful to us individually, and be able check out what signals other lusers extract from this snowballing clusterfsck of textual intercourse..
Lots of action like this would really help this website extract sharper signals from noise (that's the point of moderation, right?)
another idea would be to give us
It's ironic that so many people here defend freedom in words, but act up in a big hissy snit when when "their" words are freely used. Who cares at this point and in this context if ideas are "fixed in a tangible medium" and subject to copyright protection by the US Congress, Courts, and Armed Forces? Attribution would be nice, but can lead to unmanagably obnoxious advertising, right? Why perpetuate the legal fictions and try to assert property rights? It's a losing battle. Wanna consult your lawyer every time you think a thought? Like they say, what goes around, comes around..
Who knows how much NATO spent to force Milosevic out of Kosovo? Billion$, right? Wouldn't that money (or even a small part of it) have been far more effectively invested in providing decentralized communications access to the *people* in Kosovo/Serbia? Likewise in Iraq? Fighting fire with fire causes a tit-for-tat vicious spiral of suffering and resentment. Better douse it with water. "Bombing" civilians with uncensored bits will empower people to topple their oppresive despots better, cheaper, faster.
As it stands, NATO taxpayer dollars/euros now finance isolation policies that kill thousands of children every month, in the case of Iraq, from sewage-born infestation, malnutrition, exposure etc. Slow and painful. The US domestic propoganda machine ignores this, prefering to focus tv attention on finger wagging at that bad-boy "Sadaam" and his "weapons of mass destruction".
But asking the doublespeaking largest-arms-dealer-in-the-world named Uncle Sam to demostrate real decency may be unrealistic, in light of his past behavior. Still, you gotta thank Arpanet for the Internet:)
My solution? I'm only going to work for myself.
It may be the only solution, unless you want to be a cog in a wheel that spins only to maximize the ROI for shareholders and their greedy values. Increasingly, corporations are getting hip to ownership as motivator, and so offer employees teensy tiny shares of stock. Better than nothing. But when you form a company to employ yourself, be sure to consider alternative structures for incorporation that distribute ownership equitably among all participants.
10%? 1%? What real world are you talking about? The Internet is global. Many more than 10% of today's kids are quite hungry right this second. Think that has little to do with programming jobs? Fast foward: 3 billion people will have 'net access in ten short years, including a few of the hungry kids who don't die of starvation this year. Lots of hungry people will be competing for "jobs" in an idea economy. Welcome to Bangalore. Welcome to the Real(tm) RealWorld(tm).
/ramble ON/
:)
/ramble OFF/
Interesting dilemma: we need laws (restrictions) "to protect" our freedoms.
RMS suggests calls "protection" a propoganda term which views the situation from the point of view of the person or company that owns the monopoly, rather than the millions of others who are restricted by it. Yet he quite effectively protects software freedoms, and wields his GPL as a powerful tool to enforce such protections. Millions of users are affected by his powerful copylefts. Billions will be within a decade. (It's probably a very good thing, but it's a complex thing.. it's a juicy dilemma:)
He suggests we avoid the words "intellectual property" because they fail to distinguish between copyright and patent law. IMO, patent and copyright law are quite similar in that both legalize an artificial scarcity. Temporary monopolies granted by such laws intend to motivate "advancement of the useful arts" by permitting "owners" of such monopolies restrict uses thereof, as in the case of copyright owners "licensing" use of code.
"Copyleft" may advance useful arts much faster by requiring the act of sharing, and thus restricts the reinvention of wheels. If you look at Linux growth, you could might even call the GPL a powerful capitalist tool. It frees trade
Oops! Call it "GNU/Linux" growth..
Trademark Law, OTOH, is a different animal. It doesn't legalize fictional scarcity, rather it identifies a badge or brand or reputation. It helps to give credit where credit is due, supports fair attribution, and grows increasingly valuable as info gluts in growing abundance. Trademarks are a foundation for Trust, the most powerful free trade tool of all.
A weakness of the GPL may be that it doesn't provide for fair attribution. (See Linux vs GNU/Linux) How to work around it without "obnoxious advertising"? [vague idea: maybe attribution can be cross-licensed or accountably arranged between subdomains under root URLs..]Who knows?
"Property"? Outdated word. Ideas aren't things, they're actions. Trade is more about relationships than ownership. Partnership more than domination. What's a good replacement name for "Intellectual Property" Laws? Who knows? Idea Law? Trust Law? "Ethics"? "Accountability"?
In the end, IMO, disclosure, accountability and reputation management will be the most free and powerful means to inhibit parasitic free-riders in the trade of ideas.
If this free-speech-vs-free-beer deficiency in the English language gets tiresome to explain again and again, why not move on to the word "freed"? As far as I can tell, once code is GPL'd, it is freed, liberated, opened and can't return to closed proprietary secrecy and hiding. Done deal. Past tense. "Freed Software". In the future, you can still charge money for it, or you can give the Freed Software away for free.
m-w: FREE implies a usually permanent removal from whatever binds, confines, entangles, or oppresses [FREED the animals from their cages]
Given the rate of accelerating change, this sounds like a low-priority text, as it doesn't address the more important shift in business ownership/relationship. Customers are empowered by technology, and ultimately they will demand to be part "owners" in their businesses. After all, customers provide attention, info, and cash. People who can afford to buy stock in Amazon, E-bay, Yahoo, AOL etc are already "owning" a piece of the action, and thus further motivated to trade in "their" channels.
Still, the current IPO model seems like a gigantic (and breakable) chain of greedy fools. Intelligence will route around it, using the far more powerful "chaordic" model envisioned by Dee Hock and partly implemented by Visa. (a huge info-biz w/ 30 yrs experience growing 20% annually). Visa defines "ownership" as non-transferable "right to participate". Participants cooperate and compete for relationships, not ownership. The chaordic model is a decentralized magnet for the greatest resouce of all: human ingenuity.
Regarding "efficiency".. it's probably over-rated: "As information and intelligence become the domain of computers, society will place new value on the one human ability that can't be automated: emotion. Imagination, myth, ritual -- the language of emotion -- will affect everything from our purchasing decisions to how well we work with others.. ideas like quality, efficiency, and reliability will no longer sell products."
How well we work with others (trade) has a lot more to do with "relationship" than "ownership".
Yes. It's clear Real knew exactly what it was doing, took a calculated risk, had the patch prepared well in advance, and probably considers this episode a successful advance of its "learning ecosystem".
If you've read about Rob Glaser (Real CEO), you've learned he's spawn from the M$ culture, and is eager to reproduce it on his own by a.)gaining ubiquity and b.)leveraging proprietary advantage. He's not to be trusted. But it's hard to trust many shareholder-owned corporate entities these days. And trust is the basis of loyalty, trade, and cooperative advantage.
In the end, (and this may sound a little outrageous), any company that operates on an "us" (owners) vs. "them" (customers) basis, sneaking around, seeing what they can get away with, etc. is doomed. The corporation that can figure out how to include customers in the equity equation will thrive by generating the most trust (trade). (After all, customers provide attention, cash flow, preferences data, etc.) Sound crazy? Well, it's what Dee Hock envisioned for Visa.. He guessed Visa would be 4 times more powerful today if merchants and cardholders shared ownership..
Also.. thank god the w3 is challenging the p3p patent.. the more we individuals can control our "own" privacy, the less we'll be under the thumb of big government and big money, the more accountability will free the flow of our info, and the more trust and trade there'll be online.
Now you have a many-to-many relationship, although the dynamics of communication and it's content have not changed
um.. maybe the fax machine had a little something to do with the fall of a certain wall in Berlin, and a certain big bad bear that built it? Many-to-many relationships enabled by networked info machines distinctly changes the both dynamic of communication and the content carried by it.
If this evident fax effect serves as a precedent, society is likely adapt to the Internet, rather than the other way around. Moore's Law will let you buy today's laptop in 2010 for $15-$20, and it will also be a cel phone: Gilder's Law, (bandwidth triples yearly to 2025) suggests that broadband duplex communication will cost pennies or even be free. Metcalf's Law, (the power of a network is the square of its nodes) will empower billions of people to trade learning and tap human ingenuity like never before. The party hasn't even started..
Roblimo wonders if all the intelligence focused on 'net wouldn't be better focused on eliminating poverty. Well, there's probably no better tool than the 'net to do this: when it costs ten bucks for an access device and the connect fee is negligable, earning only $350 a year won't be such a barrier to entry. Informed populations won't be so easily kept under despotic thumbs. And we're likely to see globally-connected leap-froggin' knowledge workers undercut high wages paid in the developed world. It's already happening in places like Bangalore.
Sure, it's we the people that make the changes.. but how easily can we make them without decentralized electronic communications?
That would be affordable, friendly, memorable, attract loyalty and secure plentiful repeat biz. Coke "DOESN'T GET IT"(TM).
If you believe in free exchange of ideas and resist censorship of your opinions and cultural expressions, then opening the source code for "money" is well worth talking about.
Tax evasion might be parasitic, but so might governmental policies taxing the creation rather than consumption of value. Maybe you don't like funding the "war on drugs" or corporate welfare for a booming prison industry either. Maybe you believe some forms of "intellectual property" are unethical and unfair barriers to fair trade. Maybe you think bombarding people with access to information instead of deadly bombs (iraq, kosovo) might engender far more liberty and justice for all. You might then look for alternative systems to trade your valuables.
As Hobbex says here, most of today's "offshore" alternatives are in reality subject to forceful persuasion. But unprecedented, dynamic, distributed, smart, encrypted exchange mediums could redefine "borders" and free a great deal of trade in ideas..
..unsustainable! Intelligence is likely route around it.. Vince Cate has a lot of info on this overall thread:
"The IRS says that a US citizen who is out of the country for 330 days or more of the year does not owe any taxes on his first $70,000 earned outside the country. Clearly, you want to incorporate your business in some tax haven country and pay yourself less than $70,000 per year. By doing this, you can then travel around as a "PT" and legally avoid taxes."
"The consumer gets the best deal in terms of products, service, and price when there is competition. If people move freely between countries, governments that do not provide good service at a reasonable price will loose people to those that do. Countries will start to compete for people, or they will loose people. This will make governments provide better services with less taxes. Governments will have to be more efficient."
Well, how many TVs are in China today? Asia? ROW? How much do TVs cost users today?
My nifty $1000 sony vaio today will cost you $15 bucks in 2010. Spread easy payments over 3 years! DSL today connects me to you for $50 bucks a month. 2010 it'll cost three cents a year. $5 or 10 bucks a year seems like affordable access, even if you make only $350 bucks a year. Either refute Gilder's law, or do the math. Moore's law is way over-rated.
Wireless bandwith doubles every 9 months. The Chinese cel phone market (wireless) is alreadly exploding today in 1999. Extrapolate. How smart a device will $100 buy in 2010? $10? How many Chinese will connect? 400 million by 2010? 2015? 2020? (And what if rural access spreads with agents like Grameen?) What year do *you* predict that more chinese will be online than us citizens are alive?
and again, btw: top level domains should be linguistic, non militaristic.