MishMash

What is the European Parliament for?

We elect MEPs, who stand up for us against the interests of big business, only to have their efforts overturned by the Council. Who are also elected, but not to do that job. Weird system, that.

The law 'aims to boost innovation by ensuring that those who invest in developing genuinely new products that depend on computer implemented technology can, like those who develop other products, get a fair reward,' said the European Commission in a statement. [CORDIS]

Where is the evidence that innovation has been harmed by lack of patentability?

This is the EU which is supposed to be so keen on the importance of SMEs.

Intellectual Honesty

Edd Dumbill's comments on intellectual honesty have some relevance to my last post, and are worth reading anyway.

The state of affairs demands that we take a big step, and stop looking only to breathless yes-men. We must find people who will criticise us honestly and make them our friends. We must learn to view being wrong as an essential step to getting it right, and not as another vote for the worthlessness of our existence. We must, foremost, be honest with ourselves. [Edd Dumbill]

Innovation and Open Source

IT Managers' Journal [via LWN] has an article about Mitch Kapor's take on the open source software development model. The opening paragraph caught my eye.

The software development model that produced Lotus 1-2-3 and Microsoft Windows and created long lists of multi-millionaires in the process is all but over, says Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus, the EFF, and Open Source Application Foundation. In its place stands open source software, where the model is, "Do good work, make a decent living and maybe make the world a better place." [Chris Gulker]

Of course, this is all well and good coming from someone who made his own fortune from software like, er, Lotus 1-2-3. More interesting than that, though, is that Kapor is now ploughing a considerabke amount of that fortune into the Open Source Software Foundation. There is something about this which feels uncomfortably like using wealth created using the old model to subsidise the new model. Whether or not the old model created any value is neither here nor there if the new model cannot raise the capital needed to get started, or if it unsustainably depletes the available pool.

As the article alludes to later, we might separate more-of-the-same software (the vast bulk of it) from genuinely-something-new software.

Open source robotics software and patent weirdness

The OROCOS project, which finished in August 2003, aimed to build a library of open source software for robotics and machine tool control. Explains project coordinator Herman Bruyninckx, "Very simply, our goal is to become the Linux for machine tool and robot control - to make available and distribute a free software infrastructure in support of that goal." [CORDIS]

An interesting thing to make it onto the CORDIS web site, especially so close to the recent debate about software patents. The article raises the ugly spectre of software patents in a bizarre way:

The topic of open-source software arouses fierce passions, both among backers of free software for user communities and the software manufacturers who want to protect their business investments. The European Commission wishes to harmonise the way such patents are treated by national governments across the EU. The Commission has tried to ensure that software patents apply only to ideas or technical devices that are novel and have a clear technical consequence. The European Parliament passed on 24 September A new pan-European law governing the application of patents to software programmes. Yet proponents of open source software are uneasy. [CORDIS]

What patents? The first time they are mentioned is in the phrase "such patents".

And damn right Free Software advocates uneasy. Free software authors are totally unable to defend themselves against patent infringement claims, however absurd.

The ability to patent and establish a monopoly on an idea has morphed from being a mechanism to encourage innovation into some kind of fundamental right. A means has become and end in itself.

Comments from Ari Jolma on my Open Source paper

My recent paper on the potential value of open source software in Hydroinformatics has stimulated another response (in addition, that is, to those published in the Journal from Profs. Mike Abbott and Jean Cunge). I will respond to Ari Jolma's comments here quoting, with permission, from his email.

I read with great interest your paper in J. Hydroinformatics. There surely is a need for free software and open and useful standards in Hydroinformatics.

The word "useful" in this sentence, apparently so innocuous, is critical, I think. I managed to resist all but the briefest comment on this subject in my thesis, because it was clearly off topic, but that brief comment I did feel compelled to make. Interoperability, Not Standards is Clay Shirky's mantra. Shirky was talking about premature standardisation in the context of Peer to Peer software. His conclusions seem valid for the hydroinformatics world too, however.