Open Source and Open Formats
,----[ Quote ]
| Without a documented, open standard, the application becomes the only way to
| get data into or out of a file. If the application is a closed-source,
| commercial program, then the user is at the software company's mercy, hoping
| that the program will continue to work, and that the format contains no
| serious bugs. The economics of proprietary software reward complicated and
| hard-to-understand file formats, because they ensure that users will continue
| to use the program.
|
| With open-source sofware, the opposite is true: Programmers have an incentive
| to make the file format as open and readable as possible, and to encourage
| others to write programs that work with the same format. Format changes are
| documented and debated by a community of programmers and users, ensuring that
| the program strikes a good balance between backward compatibility and future
| features.
`----
http://ostatic.com/158404-blog/open-source-and-open-formats
Can We Get Rid Of The Myth That More Patents Means More Innovation?
,----[ Quote ]
| Patents don't help with that. In fact, patents quite often can often do a lot
| more damage by slowing the pace of innovation -- limiting the ability for
| companies to improve upon a technology or even a business model concept.
`----
http://techdirt.com/articles/20080306/143656468.shtml
Microsoft and its lobbying arms lie about this. All spin for profit.
Related and recent:
If Intellectual Property Is Neither Intellectual, Nor Property, What Is It?
,----[ Quote ]
| The main reason why I have trouble with the "property" part isn't just the
| fact that it leads people to try to pretend it's just like tangible property,
| but because it automatically biases how people think about the concept.
`----
http://techdirt.com/articles/20080306/003240458.shtml
"Intellectual property" is a silly euphemism
,----[ Quote ]
| Once the ideas have escaped there's no getting them back ...
|
| "Intellectual property" is one of those ideologically loaded terms that
| can cause an argument just by being uttered. The term wasn't in
| widespread use until the 1960s, when it was adopted by the World
| Intellectual Property Organization, a trade body that later attained
| exalted status as a UN agency.
|
| WIPO's case for using the term is easy to understand: people who've "had
| their property stolen" are a lot more sympathetic in the public
| imagination than "industrial entities who've had the contours of their
| regulatory monopolies violated", the latter being the more common way of
| talking about infringement until the ascendancy of "intellectual
| property" as a term of art.
|
| Does it matter what we call it? Property, after all, is a useful, well-
| understood concept in law and custom, the kind of thing that a punter can
| get his head around without too much thinking.
|
| That's entirely true - and it's exactly why the phrase "intellectual
| property" is, at root, a dangerous euphemism that leads us to all sorts
| of faulty reasoning about knowledge. Faulty ideas about knowledge are
| troublesome at the best of times, but they're deadly to any country
| trying to make a transition to a "knowledge economy".
|
| Fundamentally, the stuff we call "intellectual property" is just
| knowledge - ideas, words, tunes, blueprints, identifiers, secrets,
| databases. This stuff is similar to property in some ways: it can be
| valuable, and sometimes you need to invest a lot of money and labour into
`----
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/feb/21/intellectual.property
|
|
