Ideas & Trends: The Free Market: A False Idol After All?
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As the world gets complicated, regulation finds some new fans from an unlikely quarter.
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Aims Ivory Tower at 'Corruption' Well, that's it. You'll never have to listen to Stanford professor Larry Lessig talk about Free Culture again.â¦
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Will the product patents regime lead to unsustainably high drug prices? A demonstration against patenting of drug products in Chennai.
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One of the most important recent events in the world of free software has been the release of version 3 of the GNU GPL.  There were fierce arguments about its utility while it was being drawn up, and although the rhetoric has abated somewhat, there is still a big question mark over its eventual success.  Some evidence suggests that GPLv3 uptake is coming along nicely, while other reports indicate a reluctance to adopt it (but note also Matt Asay's neat reconciliation of these contradictory messages).  To see what's likely to happen in the long term, it's useful to look back at the past history of licence adoption.
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The market moves in mysterious ways -- except over the long term.
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Are you ready to find the ultimate market beater?
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One of the proverbial back stories of IT operations has always been the battle between the "suits" and the "techies." From the techie point of view, the hapless but disturbingly powerful suits are the business guys who put more thought into picking out hundred-dollar silk ties at Nordstrom than they put into million-dollar IT decisions. Worse, the suits gravitate towards outsourcing and service firms that implement big-dollar solutions. Many techies start on the other end of the spectrum with free open source solutions that reflect a substantial DIY ethic. Will the twain ever meet?
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Readers defend the profit motive, are skeptical of a government subsidized media and remind us that magnets break down.
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Although there are a lot of different ways to go about the pursuit of happiness, the assumption underlying the policies of all western governments is that More, Bigger, Faster, Shinier- in the form of maximisation of economic growth is the way forward. This isn't an accident. The western powers are democracies of one form or other and when it comes to consumerism the light is on and burning brightly for the masses. There are however a few reasons why consumerism in its current form isn't a particularly good way to go about the pursuit of happiness, either at the level of individuals or societies.
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When 'free' isn't free An online advertiser that falsely claimed consumers had won free prizes has agreed to pay a $200,000 penalty to the Federal Trade Commission, which says the outfit failed to disclose that people had to spend money first.â¦Learn &amp; Contribute, Live &amp; Online - The Register Debates Green Computing
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Why is the government paying for our consumer electronics? A contrary opinion on the voucher program for mandatory analog TV conversion. In Gadget Lab.
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NEWSMAKER While a majority of European nations back a voluntary code of ethics that declares computer software as unworthy of patents, some still grant patents to software companies. Follow BetaNews' Scott Fulton as he untangles the European patent debate, with its lively characters and its strange twist on politics in which left-wing opponents are adopting right-wing tactics.
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The market timing theory known as contrarian analysis is based on the tendency of investors to be wrong about the stock marketâs direction.
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The dangers of software patents for free software have always been a hot issue.  But with the news that Red Hat and Novell are being sued for alleged patent infringement by IP Innovation, the matter has moved from theory into practice.  In fact, in the battle against software patents, it turns out that the open source world already has a rather powerful weapon in its armoury â even if it's one that few people know about. read more
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The wit who dubbed August "the dog days of summer" could have been looking at 2004's tech stocks in his crystal ball. Just what is ailing these critters? Let's look at all of the possible explanations. Perhaps by eliminating the foolish and transient we can discover a theme and pick up some bargains.
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By its very nature, open-source software would appear to run counter to the goals of venture capitalists. Not only is it distributed and developed for free by a loose-knit group of techies from around the
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(InfoWorld) - What's the link between eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, often regarded as the father of modern economics, and the open-source software movement? According to Marten Mickos, the chief executive officer of open-source database company MySQL, it's Smith's concept of an "invisible hand," which guides individuals pursuing their own betterment to achieve goals that also benefit society at large. Mickos sees an invisible hand at work in much of what's going on in today's open-source community. This includes the wrangling over the current draft of the GNU general public license version 3 (GPLv3), which he anticipates will result in a good outcome. MySQL's database is distributed under the GPL. Even Oracle's surpriseÂ acquisition of InnobaseÂ a year ago has worked out well, Mickos contends. Oracle's purchase was widely seen as a predatory strike against MySQL, which bundles the Finnish startup's InnoDB database storage engine with its database. The move led to other firms approaching MySQL about developing their own engines for the database and ended up with the company opening up its database storage API (application programming interface) to third parties to give users more choice of which engines to use. Mickos also talked about other aspects of the open-source business model and what lies ahead for MySQL when he chatted Friday with the IDG News Service. What follows is an edited transcript of that conversation. IDGNS: Recently, a number of open-source developers have expressed their unhappiness with the Free Software FoundationÂ (FSF) and the second draft of GPLv3. Are you concerned about a potential forking of the license as some people stick with GPLv2 and others move to GPLv3? Mickos: It's not a catastrophe if we have two GPLs out there. It does show how sometimes success can turn against you. The fact that GPLv2 has been so successful means developers don't see a need to change. They say, 'If it's not broke, don't fix it.' I agree with the arguments the FSF has with the license. They've done their homework and they have good rational reasons for changing it. But they also have a philosophical, dogmatic attitude that many open-source developers don't have. We've always preached that open source is not a religion or a political party or a society. FSF does have a societal aspect. That's a great area but some developers don't care. They're not here to save mankind or save the planet from destruction. The process is still ongoing. It's time to debate, not time to deliver conclusions. At MySQL, we haven't made up our minds on GPL and we don't need to do so yet, it's not time. IDGNS: How do you decide when MySQL needs to develop new features for the database and when to rely on the open-source community for those innovations? Mickos: One of the essences of our business is to know when to do what. You need to figure out what the end user wants. We have 10 million users. How the heck do you figure out what they want and then figure out how to do it? If 9 million want one thing and 1 million another, it could be that the 1 million is more important than the 9 million. It's the ability to know what makes sense. Thanks to the early releases [of our products], we can fix mistakes. We're allowed to make mistakes in passing. For example, we had an internal project on optimization or a cache that we were developing, then we found someone else was developing one too. We could turn [around] our mistake and choose what was best. Or, take our JDBC (Java database connectivity) driver. The community developed three, four or five. One was clearly the market leader. We acquired and licensed it and brought the developer onboard. We didn't decide, but let the ecosystem or Darwinism say what works best. IDGNS: So, is open source then a more forgiving environment than the proprietary software world? Mickos: No, you're not forgiven, but open source is self-healing. There's no forgiveness, but someone else can cover up for you. A year ago, Oracle bought InnoDB. Now, a year later, there are many ways you can store MySQL and many players. It's like the invisible hand that Adam Smith spoke about is really working. There's some sort of invisible hand guiding open source. At the end of the day, something good can come out of it. Some people are very angry with FSF, still people will see a community and a good outcome [with GPLv3]. IDGNS: What's ahead in 2007 for MySQL? Mickos: We'll see a strong uptake in the enterprise market as the number of users running MySQL 5.0 grows. It takes time for developers to adopt the new version; it's starting to happen. We'll seeÂ more partners. We already have Novell, Hewlett-Packard, Unisys, and recently Red Hat. There will be others. With our technologies, there will be Falcon and MySQL 5.1. We're doing great work on our GUI (graphical user interface) tools and making our ODBC (open database connectivity) and JDBC drivers even better. IDGNS: What's the latest news on Falcon, the transactional database engine being developed by database architect Jim Starkey who joined MySQL in February? Mickos: It's not just Jim Starkey. We have a handful of engineers working closely with him. The next stage is for Falcon to be in alpha [testing], which will be soon. IDGNS: Is MySQL's current dominance of the open-source database market ever a cause for concern? Mickos: I do hear sometimes from staff, "We're great. We don't need to work." But then our engineers are very self-deprecating and they get embarrassed about any problems. It's a balancing act. Sometimes, I have to say to the organization, "Cheer up, we have a great product;" other times, "Don't be complaisant. We're not done yet." If we're good, we keep going at it until we feel we're done and can rest. If something bad happens, we should work a little bit harder to get it done. Like it looked bad when Oracle acquired InnoDB. At first it was "What the heck are we going to do?" But weÂ turned it to our advantage.