Wolf Richter » Uncategorized

Welcome back, UK!

wolf.richter — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 19:40:55 +0000

£8.25 – Pride of Calais, Sep 10, 2007. Late. More to follow…

Lunch with Martin Varsavsky / OII “Quick Gourmet” commons

wolf.richter — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 10:03:22 +0000

Last Thursday a couple of OII DPhil students had the unique chance to have lunch with Martin Varsavsky, the founder and CEO of Fon and several other start-ups. Before Martin had spoken at the Saïd Business School on European entrepreneurialism and alternatives to emigration to Silicon Valley. I will write some more lines both on the talk and the lunch, but would like to give in to public demand and share the menu of “The Oriental Condor” right away.

We agreed on peer-producing a commons of recommended economic restaurants around the OII and provide menus and telephone numbers available at our fingertips. What do you think would be the most appropriate format? Adding comments containing more menus to this blog post or set up an OII “Quick Gourmet Wiki”? Your opinion is as always highly appreciated!

Does Linux always imply generativity?

wolf.richter — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 09:57:13 +0000

Just as we discussed about the subversive potential of open source software, I wondered if that is always the case. Linux is built on a kind of UNIX kernel. UNIX has been developed as a multi-user system featuring a sophisticated user rights management system. Windows on the other side had to introduce the rights concept retroactively and everybody, who was ever forced to administer a Windows machine in a public access environment knows its shortcomings.

The most cited argument I heard from my previous clients on why they considered Linux as an alternative to Windows was “improved security”, not only against attacks from the outside, but also to prevent their employees from installing software they did not like, e.g. filesharing tools. By setting individual access rights at a fine granular level an administrator of a Unix PC can much better control which actions a user is allowed to perform and which she isn’t.

I follow the argument, that a PC with an open operating system has a subversive potential only under the condition that the user has access to superuser (su) rights, which allows compiling and installing of software. What about a scenario, in which users receive their PCs with Linux, a preinstalled set of software, no compiler, no source code and no superuser password? Isn’t this the ideal infrastructure for an appliancized scenario that is threatening generativity?

VCs go software patents

wolf.richter — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 09:55:56 +0000

When I researched Intellectual property in 2002 to find a suitable topic for my master’s thesis, the web was full with articles, comments and opinions on software patents. Most of them I found to lack proper significant scientific foundations and seemed to be more driven by pursuit of a more or less hidden agendas or plain religious beliefes. Given that I wanted to work on a sizeable problem for my thesis, I decided to leave software patents and decided to do some work on the European Database Directive.
Revisiting the literature more than four years later, things do not seem to have changed a lot. The big voices of cyberlaw (e.g. Lessig, Benkler, just to name two authors I read last week) acknowledge the importance of the topic and the concerns they have about freedom of innovation, but only to continue with their exegesis of current issues of copyright law. John Palfrey writes in his noteworthy blog entry on Aug 3 that “the cyberlaw community, myself included, has been so focused on copyright that we haven’t delved as deeply into patent (and trademark and trade secret, perhaps, too) as we might.” This lack of academic involvement may easily explain the lacking fact base, but might also reflect the perceived practical importance of software patents as opposed to the so far more theoretical threat it had on the development of open source software.
So what immediately caught my attention was John Palfrey’s claim that the VC community had recently discovered patent protection as a means of protecting their investment. This stroke me, because I hadn’t heard that before!
While in other sciences, namely chemistry and biology, using patents to get seed funding for start-up companies is common practice, VCs in the software business were very reluctant to get involved in this business. This observation is mostly based on my contacts with my former colleagues from Swiss Federal Institute in Zurich, who now mostly work as patent attorneys or licensing experts in biotech and pharma, but hardly ever deal with software. I would be very interested in getting to know more about this. Is there any reliable source of facts to back this claim? The quoted article in the Economist is mostly based on qualitative evidence and non-industry specific figures on licensing revenues.
How a well working patent system, also for software, could be working is well covered in Jim Moore’s idealistic essay “The software patent process can be your friend”. What is in theory a great idea (”disclose your ideas instead of keeping them secret and get rewarded with a limited state-guaranteed monopoly” that offers a “small company” protection from “the mercy of the market strength”) looks quite different in reality.
Jim explains that the expensive and resource intensive system is mainly a tool of large companies and fails to offer protection to small companies, which could need the patent protection to obtain venture capital. But that is only one of the objection against the current practice on software patents. Another much stronger argument is the limited insight contained in many software patents. Jim claims that “patent documents covering software are inherently open source, in contrast to the closed world of software trade secrets—where code is buried in compilation.”
But if you read a real patent application you will hardly ever find source code. A greate example are the current patent claims of IBM against Amazon over US patents 5,796,967, 5,442,771, 7,072,849, 5,446,891 and 5,319,542.
While I do not dare to judge if the “person skilled in the art” will find anything inventive in these disclosures, the MSc in Computer Sciences which I am is having some difficulties.
The empricial lack of reliance on patents by VCs to me was not only proof of the structural assymmetry between “the small” and “the big” in accessing the patent system, but also due to the fact that software patents were not used to protect innovation of new market entrants but to protect existing markets by putting up a thicket of defensive patents.
Is this now changing? It would be interesting to get more voices especially from the VC community, what kind of protection they require for seed funding in software and what roles software patents play in their go-to-market strategy.

Exploring our Second Life

wolf.richter — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 09:54:55 +0000

As part of their quest to understand the wonders of the universe with particular focus on the Internet, a small group of dauntless OII investigators decided to launch an initiative to explore Second Life, currently the most talked about digital community. Following proper research in the respective sources, they were promised a “user created immersive entertainment”, where people “attended class” or “even run businesses”. What would you expect?
A privately owned, but self-governed playground for digital citizens? A parallel universe, large enough to even attract the attention of the U.S. internal revenue service? A large social experiment to study, what people would find worthwhile to transfer to the new world and what they opt to leave behind? Jacked into the OII’s state of the art digital exploration equipment they took of last Thursday. Here is what they found:
Berkman Island – An obvious starting point for anybody with an academic interest in Second life. Meeting room and desk space for cyber scholars and obviously a popular meeting place for digital high school field trips. The OII investigation team gets stuck in a group of art students, who listen to the instructions of their teacher on how to use their cameras to take pictures of their discoveries. They are not very much interested in talking to us once they found out, that we were not sitting in the same computer lab as they do. Investigator Z. (a former Harvard student) is taking the lead and shows us around the Berkman center. At the fountain behind the Austin Hall we meet the usual drop-outs of the high school trip, who tell us how boring they find the whole excursion, ask us for cigarettes and shout as many four letter words as possible to check if their teacher is still listening.
So off we go to the Creative Common Island, admire the exhibited pieces of art and equip ourselves with politically correct T-shirts and posters.
Next stop: The Reuters building. News from all over the world is flooding the building, but except for the OII investigation team only few visitors frequent the building. Our first conversation is quit after a few sentences: “My house is burning, I need to go”. Is this cyberhumor? We definitely need to bring this up with the appropriate OII research group.
After so much hard work we sit down at a candle-lit dinner table in Holt island. The menu (unspecified game with vegetables) and the surroundings evoke sweet memories of the Keble dining hall. The sentence “What is this? Tastes like Keble” leads to some irritation with the other dining guests. After dinner Investigator McL. starts dancing the “Timewarp” on the table, which the other guests understand as an invitation to leave. So do we.
To relax after dinner we choose Bora Bora Island. We are greeted by a couple of mating cows fighting a scuba diver with light sabres in front of a Polynesian long-tail house. Not quite what we expected! Behind the unequal fighters four kinds of waves wait to be surfed. Surf boards are not quite cheap (~£8), but at least two are available to “test drive”. Playing in the wave is really quite fun. After the wipe out (and crashing a jet ski on the beach) it is time for the obligatory beach post card to send home and leave before we get a sun burn!

It is already evening, so we decide to join a Ibiza theme party. Cheesy music, light sticks and plenty of dancers with minimal textile covering are giving us a warm welcome. Investigator JJ interviews a local to get to learn the basic dancing steps necessary to survive at the pool party, while Z and McL play with their light sticks. Suddenly the night is over and the sun is looming on the horizon. Time for the after party!
Hidden behind a fashion store and a mountain we discover a large group of party people pushing it hard all dressed up in black fantasy outfits. Surrounded by dark mountains the party is going on despite the increasing daylight. White CC and red penguin t-shirts do not quite belong here. People dance in pairs or small groups and seem to know each other quite well. Conversation is scarce and non-ambiguous.
To recover from this glimpse into another culture we meet at the Sony BMG building and relax for a while in the Christina Aguilera mausoleum. Again all by ourselves we feel lonely in the perfect designed halls of the Sony representation, where everything is designed by purpose. Tired after the long excursion we decide to return to our first life. We are not much smarter then before, but under the impression of the amazing contrast of self-organized and commercially designed communities, the strange people we met and interviewed, and the large uncharted territory, we are determined to get the funding for another exploration and come back soon!