[Patents] more inflammatory speeches from Greg

[phm@a2e.de (PILCH Hartmut)]

Greg again knows well why he is sending this stuff to the patent church
only.  By implying that the alternative to software patents is to have no
intellectual property at all ("opensource business models" which don't
leverage copyright).  Readers of our mailing list see through this kind of
trick.  But many of those at the other two lists don't, and having utopian
business models as their common enemy makes them feel good, because it can
make them forget that their own vision is the utopian one.

Greg is sending this kind of propaganda to thousands of patent specialists
every week, interspersed in some interesting news about latest
developments in software patents and comments that make all but very few
readers mistake Greg for someone who is genuinely interested in improving
the patent system.  If I was the IBM patent department, I would sponsor
this kind of newsletter.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 9 Dec 2001 13:46:33 -0500 (EST)
From: Gregory Aharonian <srctran@world.std.com>
Reply-To: intprop-l@topica.com
To: epo@mlist.austria.eu.net, intprop-l@topica.com
Subject: Open source as a job training model for Europe


    The following are excerpts from a recent study done by a UCal Berkeley
graduate student on the growing failure of open source as a business model.
He argues that where open source still has some vigor, Europe, it is not
so much as a business model but rather a job training model (i.e. giving
European programmers a chance to demonstrate experience to help them get
a better job).  I am all for European programmers getting better jobs
(though if they do so in America, I am not sure how much the EC wants to
encourage this brain drain).

    But such a role for open source in Europe is no reason to distort
patent theory (which is already distorted enough) by denying software
equal patent protection with hardware (especially in light of the growing
body of hardware/software codesign tools being developed in Europe), and
especially in light of the fact that such job preparation activities
based on Open Source don't seriously experience the litigation side of
the patent system that all other technology areas experience  (claims
to the contrary pretty much being lies).  There is no scientific logic
to retaining 52.2.C and little more business logic.

Greg Aharonian
                              ====================


     The Fading Altruism of Open Source Development by David Lancashire
             First Monday, volume 6, number 12 (December 2001),
     URL: http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_12/lancashire/index.html

     _________________________________________________________________

     The Fading Altruism of Open Source Development
     David Lancashire

     Abstract
     The nexus of open source development appears to have shifted to
     Europe over the last ten years. This paper explains why this
     trend undermines cultural arguments about "hacker ethics" and
     "post-scarcity" gift economies. It suggests that classical economic
     theory offers a more succinct explanation for the peculiar
     international distribution of open source development: hacking
     rises and falls inversely to its opportunity cost. This finding
     throws doubt on the Schumpeterian assumption that the efficiency
     of industrial systems can be measured without reference to the
     social institutions that bind them.

     David Lancashire is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political
             Science at the University of California, Berkeley.
                    E-mail: david@socrates.berkeley.edu

Contents

     Introduction
     Cultural and Economic Theories of Open Source Development
     A Framework for Analysis
     The Raw Data
     Economic Theory Revisited
     Implications and Conclusions

                              ====================

   [..................]

   Institutional differences in the organizational structure of American
     and European software industries have exacerbated the two regions'
    economic divergence. As Trevor Nakagawa reminds us, only four of the
   top fifty software producers in 1998 were European, and 84 percent of
   these firms' revenues traditionally came from markets within the EU -
   markets heavily penetrated by American producers [36]. European firms
      lag significantly behind their American counterparts in terms of
     global software exports [37]. Social factors, such Europe's higher
      levels of software piracy, may be partially responsible for this
    difference. Whereas the Business Software Alliance estimates that 25
       percent of all American business applications are pirated, its
    estimates of European piracy levels run from a low of 35 percent in
    Denmark and Germany, to over 50 percent in the Netherlands, and over
      70 percent in Ireland and Greece [38]. Language barriers - which
     create smaller markets where amortizing development costs is more
     difficult - may also contribute to lower wages in Europe. National
     software development is simply less lucrative in smaller and less
                           cutting-edge markets.


       In short, the success of Silicon Valley in the 1990s cannot be
     understood without reference to broader economic pressures at the
     international level; American competitiveness in the pre-packaged
   software market flowed naturally from the United States' position as a
    world leader in modular computer hardware development [39]. The rise
     and fall of the American hacker cannot be understood in isolation
   either. Very significant improvements in the real income of high-tech
    workers followed the changes in worker "skill sets" demanded by the
   new forms of industrial organization first prevalent in the high-tech
   corridors of Boston and San Francisco. It seems likely that the future
    of the American high-tech industry and the popularity of open source
   hacking will depend on how patterns of labor use are encouraged by the
    consolidation of networking technologies or their extension in mass
                           industrial production.

     If this simplified model can explain the relative erosion of open
   source production in the United States, can it explain the rise of it
   Europe? Primarily, it should be clear that if the opportunity cost of
   working on open source projects is lower for European developers than
     their American counterparts, the potential benefits Europeans gain
     from working on them are much greater as well. In a global economy
    lacking perfect labor mobility and characterized by wage-inequality
    across countries, we expect individuals to produce free software if
   doing so can help them shift to a higher wage-level. This "fixed-cost"
    analysis implies (as Lerner and Tirole suggest in their paper) that
   developers may embrace open source work as a way to tap-into lucrative
        corporate networks abroad. This may explain why open source
   development is more popular in Canada than the United States, although
   the data from Europe is inconclusive on this question. This also helps
    to explain why the majority of open source developers are relatively
    young [40]. Older, settled programmers have less need to establish a
    monetizable reputation than their younger, more mobile counterparts,
         given less time in which to amortize its immediate costs.

    In other words, the appropriate analogy for open source development
       may not be to "cooking-pots" and "cauldrons" so much as to the
   Mayflower. Addressing the similar debate over the causes of migration
           to the New World, Hatton and Williamson propose that:

     "Those who emigrated had the most to gain from the move, and were
     likely, therefore to be the most responsible to labor market
     conditions. By emigrating when young they were able to reap the
     gains over most of their working lives. By moving as single
     individuals they were able to minimize the costs of the move,
     including earnings forgone in passage and during job search" [41].

    Conceptualizing open source work as a "fixed cost" young programmers
       face in order to establish a quantifiable reputation offers a
    convincing explanation for the peculiar demographics of open source
   development, and helps explain in particular why the phenomenon seems
    prevalent among young college-educated men. This nicely supports the
     observation made by Bezroukov that the romanticization of the open
    source movement in academic circles may have played a vital role in
                         fuelling its early growth.

    The analogy between open source development and historical migration
    is hardly perfect, but it is useful to consider even for its obvious
     differences. The most striking of these involves the type of labor
     assuming the fixed costs. Historically, the bulk of international
      migration has involved the extremely uneducated - those with few
      capital-invested skills, and little ability to earn a reasonable
     income in their local communities [42]. In contrast, contemporpary
          open source programmers can accurately be thought of as
      "hyper-skilled" and in many cases "over-qualified" for national
   markets. A programmer extremely knowledgeable about thread-management
      and memory protection under Unix, for instance, may find him or
      herself employed by the private sector in a completely different
   manner - writing Web-based applications or producing software through
   a mass-market integrated development environment (IDE). Establishing a
   reputation as a skilled specialist may help programmers transcend the
    limitations of their local markets - a pressure much more likely to
      influence decision-making in niche European markets with a less
                          diverse production base.

   [..................]


                          Implications and Conclusions

   But given the tremendous importance of this debate, it is vital not to
   dismiss without genuine thought and substantial reflection the points
    political economists bring to bear on this issue. For it is equally
    plausible that the benefits of the UNIX Gospel are over-exaggerated:
   possible only in certain systems (such as command-line UNIX desktops)
   and in limited circumstances (such as when inter-program communication
   can be handled through character strings). And if the truly important
    projects in the open source community are those most similar to the
        Linux and Gnome projects, which are unique in creating (not
   exploiting) a framework on which further development can be built, the
   insights political economists can shed on these movements allow for a
     much more nuanced view of development than is made by advocates of
    post-scarcity gift cultures. While this view may be less than wholly
        optimistic in its hopes for man ever transcending industrial
    capitalism, it is perhaps reassuring in concurring nonetheless with
     earlier critics that regardless of how software is produced in the
     real world, its increasing extensibility seems to be in the public
      interest and should be encouraged where feasible. End of article

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