Dana Blankenhorn

Round Two of the Copyright Wars

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 13 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

---

I have been following the copyright wars since their inception, in 1997. I watched the passage of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) in 1998, and the No Electronic Theft Act.

Both had a similar aim, to keep people from stealing making and re-selling copies of material subject to copyright, now that technology allowed for clean (or nearly clean) copies.

My sympathies here are purely with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and blogs like Boingboing, which hate these laws as attacks on freedom of speech, of association, and the free exchange of ideas.

Graphene and the Nature of Change

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 9 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

---

Change can be slow, and change can be sudden.

Those who practice the theory of “oh noes,” the idea that it's all about to go pear-shaped, either see slow change that can't be undone, or a sudden change that others see as unlikely.

The people I meet on Seekingalpha.com, the ones who are certain that we're about to go into another Great Depression, believe in sudden change. Those who talk about climate change tend to see slow change that can't be undone.

But most of the time, disaster does not strike. And sudden change can be good as well as bad.

This is one of the great things about being a science reporter, the idea that someone, somewhere, might suddenly come up with a mighty idea, one that will drive out big problems at a stroke.

Learn This Medium

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 3 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

---

There are lots of stories written about how “young people” are “clueless” about using the Internet.

These often feature pictures left on Facebook of people being young and stupid. Young and stupid are sort of synonomous.

But it's true. People have been fired from jobs, or lost an opportunity for advancement, because some biddy saw something they wrote or said online that, in the clear light of day, they probably should not have written, said, or had photographed.

I would hope that, over time, as this medium becomes a natural, normal part of growing up, we might be more forgiving of this. The whole argument is pretty stupid.

The Fall of the Suburbs

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 47 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

---

All the post-mortems on this year's elections missed the key point.

It wasn't about race, and it wasn't about class. It was about economics, specifically the economic model most of us grew up in.

That model is the suburb.

The modern American suburb was a product of the post-war boom. It featured small houses on postage-stamp lots, where former soldiers and their wives could raise children in peace with the men working in nearby offices or factories. (Above, Levittown, New York.)

What is Money?

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 37 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

---

On my new beat, at Seeking Alpha and TheStreet.Com, people talk about money all the time.

Money is, in fact, the great mystery of my working life. What is it?

Is gold money? Is a dollar money? What makes them money?

What makes them money is that they're a store of value people understand and accept. There's an assumption that if the world comes crashing down tomorrow people with gold will have money but people with paper won't.

I no longer think that's right, because the only value gold can store is excess value, and if there's no excess value to store it's not money.

The Open Source Contradiction

I will be on vacation next week and, in light of events decided y'all deserved an early present. So think of this as Volume 16, Number 35 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

---

I have covered open source since 2005, and there is an inherent contradiction in the model.

The contradiction is that projects may be “owned” and that owners can be trusted to maintain community.

The contradiction has been hiding in plain sight ever since the open source movement split from Richard Stallman's Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) camp in 1998, with the publication of Eric Raymond's “The Cathedral and the Bazaar.” Raymond and other advocates for a more “capitalist” model figured you could deal with the contradiction by just saying, in effect, “fork it.”

But that's a cop-out. You need funding to run anything. Private enterprises don't exist for code, they exist for profit. As soon as the needs of the code contradict the needs of profit, and that's solely at the profit-making enterprise's discretion, it's going to go bad for the code.

I have seen this play out many, many times. Companies have tried to change their licenses, but users revolted. Groups have revolted against their corporate overlords and forked, some successfully, others less so. We've had open source inclines – Stallman's GPL turns out to be better at building community than any BSD-like license. We've had open source development inclines – a foundation-based development model can build community better than a GPL license alone.

What's happening right now with Oracle, which threw Open Office away, tried to extort money from Google over open source Java and is now turning mySQL proprietary – is par for the course.

It's the golden rule. He who has the gold makes the rules.

The most effective approach has proven to be what I call the “scorpions in a bottle” methodology of the Apache Software Foundation. That is, you bring multiple stakeholders under a development group which is dedicated solely to the code. This is supposed to separate the business needs of the code from the development needs of the code.

But even this is subject to abuse. Oracle screwed Apache over royally when it seized Java. Other companies abuse Apache by tossing them failed products with promises of support, only to see that support (and the code) wither, damaging the Foundation's good name. It has taken Apache's leaders a lot of time to figure out that they might be getting “used” when they're offered projects, and to resist that abuse. It's an ongoing process.

Corporations understand the open source contradiction better than open source advocates do. Simon Phipps says open source “won” the Microsoft Word vs. Open Office format battle because Microsoft eventually decided to support the Open Document Format. But its gaming of the standards system maintained Word's enormous market share, and Office's profitability within the company. What was bad for the code was good for the company.

Many corporations confuse the open nature of open source development and the free downloads with free software. Open source and free software are different things. Red Hat is a true open source company, but it still requires you to buy Red Hat Enterprise Linux, even though you can look at that code, and even while that code is based on the free Fedora distribution every enterprise that's serious about using Red Hat's Linux pays for.

They pay and pay and pay. Because free code that's not understood isn't worth much to an enterprise, and the only way to truly understand that code is to engage fully in the open source process, offering “committers” to the cause who will work for the project on company time, contributing enhancements, filing bug reports, and testing buggy beta code. The love you take from open source code is always equal to the love you make, and while time is money, money is time. The deeper you engage with open source code, and its community, the more value you gain from it.

What's true for code can also be true for words, and this is what drives companies crazy. They see how Wikipedia destroyed what had been a thriving encyclopedia industry, despite all their efforts to sow Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt about the project – efforts that continue throughout academia to this day – and they get scared.

That's why Disney writers threw some open source misinformation into a kids' sitcom recently. A nerdy kid with a PC laptop asks her friends if they used open source code with a hidden virus inside it – as though open source code is virus-ridden but Microsoft code never has security flaws. The premise was stupid, but it's ingrained in the corporate mindset.

Fortunately, as with social issues like gay marriage, minds can be changed. My wife works at a company that is totally proprietary, that for security reasons never, ever trusted open source code. Until recently. Now it's suddenly using open source regularly, even asking, before engaging in a small project, whether there might be an open source workaround. That's called progress.

The open source contradiction may never be bridged, but over time it gets easier to jump over. You learn who code's friends are, who code's friends aren't. You learn that it's not just code, but people and organizations you have to learn to trust. And if you're burned once in a while – as every kid is as they grow into fully social adults – you learn from that.

Open source is growing up. It grows along with Moore's Law of Training, and as we all should know by now there is no Moore's Law of Training. There is just learning.

 

 

 

Talent Has Its Day

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 24 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

---

A lot of people are very worried about the economy right now.

I am not one of them.

The reason is my personal economy tends to follow what's going on in the wider world. I did great in the late 1990s, horrible in the early 2000s. I grew back later in the decade but then fell off during the Great Recession.

Now, it seems, I'm back on top again. Not because I'm a genius. But because today is a day when talent is in demand.

How People Enslave Themselves

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 14 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

---

Among the great mysteries of human existence is the fact that, while freedom may indeed be the endowment of our creator, people find ways to enslave themselves.

The instrument for this is fear. Fearing others dehumanizes the one who is feared, and sets up the one who fears to be dehumanized in turn.

I got a little taste of that last weekend.

It's become a trope, the young, attractive woman who suddenly drops an “n-bomb” on friends of the guy who has been chasing her, causing him to back away. It's a new trope because, until very recently, the bomb would be dropped in private and wouldn't bother our hero at all.

In this case, I was discussing current events with an otherwise sane and attractive woman in the Atlanta suburbs when the Trayvon Martin case came up. My view is that it's manslaughter, what Jerry Seinfeld once called “I can't believe it's not murder.” A law dubbed “stand your ground” is giving ordinary citizens a license to kill, leading them to believe that in protecting their neighborhoods with deadly force they will be presumed to be acting in the name of the law.

That's not what the law's advocates say it's for, but the confusion means murder charges against citizens claiming the victim is dangerous will be hard to make stick until the law changes.

This tragedy almost befell my own neighborhood of Kirkwood in Atlanta, a year ago. Some kids were harassing a convenience store clerk, and the new neighborhood watch leader apparently came upon the scene, waving his gun around to frighten them off. The gun was not fired, but the watch captain resigned. Kirkwood came that close to being Sanford, Florida.

Had that happened one of my neighbors, a kid who looked much like Trayvon Martin, might be dead. I thought the President was very statesmanlike when he pointed out, in the name of comforting Martin's family, that “If I had a son he would look like Trayvon.” This was a kid, shot in the street, and the lack of an investigation should trouble everyone.

But not the woman I was talking to. “That was very divisive,” she said. This got my back up, and her husband stuck up for her. “If a kid like that, in a hoodie, came walking around here, you'd want to know what he was doing.”

The Blackboard Jungle

Blackboard is the Oracle of online testing systems.

Most big colleges use it to give students homework, even conduct tests. My son has it at Georgia State and is prone to using the name as a verb -- "the professor decided to blackboard that."

Since it's proprietary, and there's an itch among many colleges for open source alternatives to everything, there has been an assumption in the open source community that it's going to get hit, like Microsoft was hit, by an open source alternative (like Linux).

One way to forestall that is to do what Oracle did, essentially buy out the competition. Oracle's purchase of Sun brought it mySQL, Java, OpenOffice, and a ton of bad publicity, giving Larry Ellison the kind of tsuris Bill Gates had to get used to back in the day. (Of course, that means he's crying all the way to the bank about his fee-fees being hurt.)

So Blackboard has chosen another path. Rather than buy out an open source project like Moodle, they bought two of Moodle's big support organizations, MoodleRooms and NetSpot. It created an "Open Services Support Group" specifically to sell colleges support for these open source projects.

The reaction of the open source community was kind of -- "uh-waah? Waah!"

The Education Revolution

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 11 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

---

Turns out it takes two things to spur a tech revolution.

One is capability. The other is cost.

Health care resisted automation for decades after the PC. It only began succumbing (and it's a continuing struggle) after costs got so out-of-control that care became unaffordable for increasing parts of the middle class.

It didn't matter to doctors that PCs and networks could distribute data faster than their secretaries. Automation threatened their control of the customer. Not just the retention of the account, but the choices they made on treatment, their autonomy. Their power.

Some types of technology were acceptable. Systems that made it easier to get paid, new machines, these were readily accepted. But collecting and moving patient records didn't really start until the 2009 stimulus provided the money and set a firm deadline for the industry – about 2 ½ years from now. And even now progress is agonizingly slow, with doctors, clinics and hospitals making, not tech choices, but business choices. The winners in the Electronic Health Record market turn out to be the insurers and hospital networks, who are enhancing their own control over both patients and physicians.

Education has been much the same. Even after the Internet, and wi-fi, broke the cost barrier for networked education, principals and administrators have resisted technology fiercely, for the same reason doctors did.

It's about control. If kids have network access, they can learn things that aren't in the textbook. They may even learn that teachers are engaging, not in education, but in political indoctrination, enforced from on high. The smart ones might resist and get away.

The same is true, doubly true, in higher education. Even though networks make it possible for anyone to learn anything at any time, credentialism has locked kids into rote classrooms taught by unsympathetic drones at ridiculous prices.

Teacher-controlled education is as unsustainable as doctor-controlled health care.