There's more to the article than the proposed code of conduct. From the Fine Article:
"Expect an interesting discussion next Monday, when this issue, and the draft code of conduct, will be discussed at a meeting in Geneva of WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organisation. Which as you know has a stellar record defending the little guys against claims of copyright infringement."
So it looks like the RIAA and MPAA are trying to by-pass Congress on this one, and take the easy route.
That's exactly spot on. To which needs to be added that Identify Theft won't be taken seriously until it impacts our members of Congress.
If someone were to start publishing all the SSN's, Date of Births, Credit Info, Biometric Info, Mental Health records of not just the members of Congress, but also their families, then (and only then) might they possibly rethink that centralized databases are a stupid solution. I say possibly, because the current legal market around database information is quite huge.
I say possibly, because the only tool they have is passing laws. Unfortunately, this is a case where you need the right technology, otherwise the existing information will always be abused.
And let us not forget that one of Richard Stallman's most important efforts, porting of gcc to the x86, was not done in a vacume. It required a commercial version of UNIX for the x86, and the commercial version of ATT's C compiler and Assembler. All quite legally done, too.
RMS and the rest of the world moved on from that as well, and the results are the Linux world we have today.
This step has been an obvious one for at least 5 years; it certainly has taken China and India a long time to get around to it. Let's put this in perspective.
Last quarter (February, IIRC), the San Jose Mercury News had an article in their Business section on the top 3 Indian Outsourcing firms' gross revenues.
(Tata, et. al.). It came in with an underwhelming $1.5 Billion.
If you assume all of that is from outsourcing, and they charge $10,000 per engineer, that gives a grand total of 150,000 Indian Engineers. And
these folks are all tied up with Western Outsourcing efforts. That's not a lot of Software people. A subset of Silicon Valley alone
has 800,000 jobs in it
and I'm guessing 5%, or 40,000 are Software. The entire U.S. certainly has a much bigger pool, dwarfing what it has taken India over 10 years to achieve.
So, yes, India and China have the motivation to join forces. But they don't have a pool of skilled people which begins to dwarf the U.S.. They also don't
have a Venture funding pool with even approaches the U.S.. Nor due they have an adequate legal system to protect businesses when there are contract disputes.
And both countries have a huge amount of corruption.
The only thing both do have is cheap Engineering talent.
And to top it off, many people are looking at China's balooning financial structure to "pop" over the next few years.
This is not a good base from which "to dominate the world's tech industry". To be a player, perhaps. But the U.S. can get cheap manufacturing anywhere, if it really needs to.
I'm sure we'll see a bunch of cheap products which don't work too well. But forgive me if I have doubts about their ability to dominate.
Slashdot Mirror
"Expect an interesting discussion next Monday, when this issue, and the draft code of conduct, will be discussed at a meeting in Geneva of WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organisation. Which as you know has a stellar record defending the little guys against claims of copyright infringement."
So it looks like the RIAA and MPAA are trying to by-pass Congress on this one, and take the easy route.
That's exactly spot on. To which needs to be added that Identify Theft won't be taken seriously until it impacts our members of Congress.
If someone were to start publishing all the SSN's, Date of Births, Credit Info, Biometric Info, Mental Health records of not just the members of Congress, but also their families, then (and only then) might they possibly rethink that centralized databases are a stupid solution. I say possibly, because the current legal market around database information is quite huge.
I say possibly, because the only tool they have is passing laws. Unfortunately, this is a case where you need the right technology, otherwise the existing information will always be abused.
And let us not forget that one of Richard Stallman's most important efforts, porting of gcc to the x86, was not done in a vacume. It required a commercial version of UNIX for the x86, and the commercial version of ATT's C compiler and Assembler. All quite legally done, too.
RMS and the rest of the world moved on from that as well, and the results are the Linux world we have today.
Last quarter (February, IIRC), the San Jose Mercury News had an article in their Business section on the top 3 Indian Outsourcing firms' gross revenues. (Tata, et. al.). It came in with an underwhelming $1.5 Billion.
If you assume all of that is from outsourcing, and they charge $10,000 per engineer, that gives a grand total of 150,000 Indian Engineers. And these folks are all tied up with Western Outsourcing efforts. That's not a lot of Software people. A subset of Silicon Valley alone has 800,000 jobs in it and I'm guessing 5%, or 40,000 are Software. The entire U.S. certainly has a much bigger pool, dwarfing what it has taken India over 10 years to achieve.
So, yes, India and China have the motivation to join forces. But they don't have a pool of skilled people which begins to dwarf the U.S.. They also don't have a Venture funding pool with even approaches the U.S.. Nor due they have an adequate legal system to protect businesses when there are contract disputes. And both countries have a huge amount of corruption.
The only thing both do have is cheap Engineering talent.
And to top it off, many people are looking at China's balooning financial structure to "pop" over the next few years.
This is not a good base from which "to dominate the world's tech industry". To be a player, perhaps. But the U.S. can get cheap manufacturing anywhere, if it really needs to.
I'm sure we'll see a bunch of cheap products which don't work too well. But forgive me if I have doubts about their ability to dominate.