PFF Senior Fellow and Director, Adam Thierer praises Professor Ed Felten's remarks on the legal mud-slinging between Microsoft-Google.

Whatever one thinks of the merits of the Microsoft-Yahoo merger and Google’s immediate and vociferous opposition to it, Ed Felten is 100% right when he says of Google’s actions:

“Complaining has downsides for Google too — a government skeptical of acquisitions by dominant high-tech companies could easily boomerang and cause Google its own antitrust headaches down the road.”

...On the days their own butts are on the line, they (corporations) tell us the antitrust authorities are villainous scum that must be defeated at all cost! The next day—when their competitors are in the crosshairs—the antitrust officials are regarded as benevolent knights possessing Solomonic wisdom, and we’re told that we should trust them to guide us to an economic promised land called “perfect competition.”

When innovation in the digital economy is essential for improved economic activity and consumer welfare, these consumer advocates want a piece of the action too. As Professor Lee Hollar has stated on the over-zealousness of some commentators- The buzzword du jour is “innovation,” which will be “chilled” by just about anything done."

These new consumer advocates may well find badgering successful commercial entities as its own reward.

But hyping up mole-hills, created by IPRs or dominant firms like Microsoft, as injurous to society would do substantial harm. For one, government officials would be invited to impose regulations where no harm has occurred. Second, innovators may be vilified after risking investments and face undue consumer or government scrutiny. And while many purported consumer advocates claim to be free market libertarians, one must ask whether they see themselves as replacements for the state. Market regulation, at the least, has some basis in democratic systems of political economy.

posted by Noel Le @ 11:58 AM | General

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Following post-World War II efforts by the major industrialized nations to reintegrate the global economy through Bretton Woods and other international policies, less developed nations faced the prospects of entering the global stage at different phases of economic and industrial maturity. Consequently, views of international trade were shaped by nations’ unique economic situations. As history has shown, economies subsequently adopted more open vs. closed trade practices based on immediate economic-industrial challenges.

Researchers Robert Bird and Daniel Cahoy have released a new paper on how the BRIC economies (Brazil, Russia, India, China) are taking steps towards adopting and enforcing stronger IP laws, while balancing new IP rules with their economic situations. The Emerging BRIC Economies: Lessons from Intellectual Property Negotiation and Enforcement, Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property, 2007.

It is tempting to view the BRIC’s options for the future from one of two opposing perspectives: (1) the Western property rights view, which argues for strong legal protections and the rejection of free-riding when a country has the economic strength to participate in global innovation, or (2) the Southern open access view, calling for a noble resistance to the coercion of industrialized oppressors intent on maximizing profits without a realistic understanding of development needs...

On one hand, the BRICs seem to respond to the economic incentive to limit IP enforcement when home industries can effectively copy the creativity and technology of industrialized nations. Conversely, the property rights push can seem a bit disingenuous in view of the fact that many western nations owe aspects of their economic development to a lack of IP Protection. As a result, nations often end up talking past each other or resorting to grudging conciliation without truly understanding the others’ needs.

Perhaps the dichotomous narrative is simply wrong on both counts. One can argue that it misses a middle ground that may better characterize the optimal future relationship of the BRICs with developed countries, as well as the larger developing world. It is possible that a hybrid model of IP protection and occasional exception—a process of convergence and resistance—will provide the mix necessary for developing countries to gain an economic foothold, protect the health and safety of their citizens, and play a responsible and vital role in the world economy. This model may not mimic the regimes of industrialized nations now, or event in the distant future. But it may provide a predictable projection the value of investment incentives in these growing global markets.

posted by Noel Le @ 12:15 PM | Academia , International

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Matt Asay from FOSS firm Alfresco writes on the prediction by Gartner, a noted market research firm, that 80% of commercial software will include elements of open source technology.

We're talking about Microsoft Windows...Oracle databases...SAP's ERP suite... Many of these companies already embed open source in their products but don't like to admit it or make noise about it. Market pressures will force them to stop pretending to be the source of all innovation and to "outsource" ever-growing amounts of their R&D resources to mining the best open source has to offer.

I can speak from experience that building on open-source technologies truly does lower the cost of development. Alfresco--the company I work for--went from zero lines of code to a product that had several Fortune 500 customers in just six months. We were able to leverage the strength of open-source projects like Spring, Lucene, and OpenOffice.

This is what the future looks like: heavy adoption of open source at the core of commercial software so developers can focus on pushing the envelope on innovation, not reinventing wheels that provide no discernible differentiation.

However, I disagree with an implicit message in Asay's post of the significance in ~80% of commercial software embedding open source. The fact that open source supporters benchmark the progress of open source with integration into proprietary products reveals the movement once again grasping for any kind of re-enforcement. Open source is not a new phenomenon yet supporters are inclined to tout open source potential while looking past its actual state and what holds it back. Thats why open source supporters are not asking why it is not integrated into 100% of commercial products, why its strength is in the incremental aspects of product development rather than groundbreaking R&D and why open source movement slogans suggest open source market dominence while actual market impact is weak.

posted by Noel Le @ 1:44 PM | Free Culture Movement

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Dana Blankenhorn from ZDNet writes on the hard truth of FOSS development-

Mr. Buzzword for February appears to be proprietary open source. This is an open source project which is owned or controlled by one company. Even though it may have a GPL license, you have no more power over it than a single voter in a political system.

The definition has changed since I first wrote the Open Source Incline back in 2006. It’s now a development model, not a licensing model... You have even less control over the project’s business model. If the “owner” wants to let someone do a proprietary fork which undermines your work, there may be little you can do. Especially if you happen to work for said owner.
...
And Big Blue ...must eat, as a commenter e-mailed me after I praised IBM’s Jazz contributions. They (IBM) do want to lock people into buying Rational tools, he said, and open source is a means to that end.

posted by Noel Le @ 12:31 PM | Free Culture Movement

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Martin Veitch from IT Week writes on consolidation in FOSS markets-

SpringSource is to acquire support provider Covalent Technologies as demand for services to back up open-source software investments builds up, and as open-source companies sell up or pair off... The combination demonstrates the way in which open-source companies are being acquired to capitalise on open-source building blocks, notably the so-called Lamp stack of Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Python/Perl.
...
Other leading open-source firms that have sold out include Suse (to Novell), JBoss (Red Hat), Zimbra (Yahoo), Sleepycat Software and Innobase (both Oracle).

Continue reading Defining Developments in the FOSS Movement . . .

posted by Noel Le @ 11:05 AM | Free Culture Movement

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