Tim Lee points out a couple more cases where critics of open source use fallacious broken windows arguments.
Open source skeptics, particularly those otherwise economically literate, need to be beat over the head about this for awhile.
Meanwhile, I hope economists begin attempting to quantify the value of peer production output.
Via Chris F. Masse, who does not provide a permanent link to his “external link” post, The Journal of Prediction Markets is launching late this year with several usual suspects on the editorial board. I used Inkling’s make your own market feature to create a play market in whether the journal will be Open Access:
Pays if the Journal of Prediction Markets is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals before 2008/01/01.
See the Wikipedia article for background on Open Access.
Just for kicks — as an insider decision, this is probably not a good subject for a prediction market.
I noted with interest that the journal is to be published by the University of Buckingham Press, the publishing arm of apparently the only university in the UK jurisdiction not funded by the state. Although it is small I am surprised I had not heard of this university previously due to its free market connections or in the Economist, which loves to write about the sorry state of British higher education and the even sorrier state of higher education on the European continent.
Should I take this opportunity to ask Mr. Masse (who is entirely above insinuation, a better person than I) about French universities?
Addendum 20060523: Masse thinks I’m crazy for creating a market on Inkling. He doesn’t like Inkling because they removed one of their founders from their site (irrelevant, Masse-ive overreaction) and believes that liquidity is the most important attribute of an exchange, implied corollaries being that it is dumb to start a new exchange in an area where one already exists and it is dumb to allow user-created markets, both of which will lead to diffuse, thinly-traded markets. I think the field is far too young to say that a newcomer cannot topple existing exchanges even if they are natural monopolies (We’ve discussed this before) or that large numbers of niche (and thus thinly traded) claims will not prove valuable.
Why has Masse not created a market at Inkling? Is his consultancy page correct?
Each player in the field only sees his/her little part of it —I have to have the complete, global, situational, long-term, overview outlook perspective.
Is he overconfident in his negative assessment of Inkling or merely falling behind in his research?
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts has been called a seminal album for many genres, but it was for me personally too. I discovered it while browsing the library’s LP collection for strange music, probably in 1985 or 1986. Having been exposed to the Talking Heads (which I grew to love despite hearing Take Me To The River first) and Brian Eno in prior year, I borrowed the record and immediately decided I liked it enough to tape it (a big investment at the time). It is one of the few listenings from that time period that I still indulge. Most of the tracks hold up very well.
This success led me shortly after to pick up Talking Heads ‘77 by Peach of Immortality at a used record store. It was unclear whether it had anything to do with the Talking Heads (it doesn’t) but the store owner said it was very strange. It was the first noise album in my possession and is probably the only recording I own manufactured copies of in two formats (LP and CD). I still love it.
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts was recently reissued on its 25th anniversary. This would be unremarkable but for the release of sources for two of the album tracks today under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license, which is great and very satisfying.
Of course I wish they had used a more liberal license and that the remix site wasn’t Flash-based or at least did not require Flash 8, which renders it inaccessible to Linux clients. Small complaints and a reminder to throw some money at Gnash, which seems to have made its first alpha release a few days ago.
Update: bush-of-ghosts.com claims to require Flash 8, bush-of-ghosts.com/remix does not and does work on Linux. Can’t say I’m sorry to miss whatever “interface” is on the home page.
No, not as in “artists need to think of themselves as businesses” or “open source business models” but as in entrepreneurs sharing the motivations of artists and open source contributors.
Entrepreneurship as a non-profit-seeking activity (PDF). The average entrepreneur could make substantially more money as an employee and obtain substantially better returns investing in the market rather than in the entrepreneur’s enterprise. Low risk aversion and over-optimism do not explain low financial returns to entrepreneurship. However, the majority of “breakthrough” innovations are made by entrepreneurs rather than big firms. So why start a business?
The studies discussed give a direct indication of the non-monetary benefits associated with entrepreneurship. Being an entrepreneur seems to be attractive, not because it leads to a high income or wealth, but rather because it provides non-pecuniary satisfaction from being one’s own boss, from broad possibilities to use one’s skills and abilities, and from a resulting richer work content. Although no direct evidence has been presented, it can be hypothesized that similar aspects are responsible for Åstebro’s (2003) finding that entrepreneurs’ are willing to engage in innovative activities despite of poor expected financial returns. Amabile (1983, 1997), for example, argues that people often undertake creative endeavors simply because they like to engage in interesting, exciting and personally challenging activities.
Conclusion:
Entrepreneurship is a crucial function in market economies. It is therefore important to understand what motivates people to engage in it. In this paper, it has been argued that traditional economic views on why individuals undertake entrepreneurial activities are incomplete. Entrepreneurship is not only and not even mainly a quest for profit. Rather, it is more accurately characterized as a non-profit-seeking activity. Contrary to the belief that people engage in entrepreneurship in order to make profits, a considerably body of empirical research shows that entrepreneurship is not particularly attractive in monetary terms. Being an entrepreneur emerges to be rewarding because it provides individuals with non-monetary satisfaction from aspects like higher autonomy, greater possibilities to use their skills and abilities, and the chance to be creative in pursuing their own ideas. It has been illustrated how these non-monetary benefits can be incorporated into economic theories of entrepreneurship. Further efforts along these lines seem instrumental in arriving at an improved understanding of entrepreneurship.
None of this surprises me, though I was completely ignorant of these studies. I suspect “artist” or “open source developer” would work in place of “entrepreneur” throughout most of the paper.
A little over two years ago I wrote about copying content between Wikitravel and World66 (they’re both using the same Creative Commons license that allows this). Wikitravel “won more” from the operation due to permitting more flexible editing.
Now they’ve both won through simultaneously announced acquisition by Internet Brands.
An Alexa traffic rank graph of Wikitravel, World66, and carsdirect.com, I believe the most popular Internet Brands site:
Congratulations again to Wikitravel cofounder Evan Prodromou. It’s fantastic to see projects and people like this get some commercial recognition after years of dedication to the “commons” (very broadly speaking) — see also Webjay and MusicBrainz.
Ross Mayfield has a short post on the acquisitions the best part of which is this:
Terms of the deal are not disclosed, but if you find them you could add them to this wiki page.
Gordon Mohr just pointed me at a profile of group funding startup ChipIn. Unlike some others who have thought of this, ChipIn sees a big market opportunity.
Hopefully they’ll have great success and pursue interesting mechanisms for funding public goods.
ChipIn has a blog.
Just noticed that the current LimeWire beta (4.11.0) includes optional copyright filtering. See the features history and brief descriptions for users and copyright owners:
In the Filtering System, copyright owners identify files that they don’t want shared and submit them for inclusion in a public list. LimeWire then consults this list and stops users from downloading the identified files “filtering” them from the sharing process.
If you sign up for an account as a copyright owner you can submit files (with file name, file size, SHA1 hash, creator, collection, description) for filtering. Users can turn the filter on and off via a preference.
LimeWire.org now features a blog with pretty random content. I notice that another PHP Base32 function (which makes a whole lot more sense than the one included in Bitcollider-PHP — I swear PHP’s bitwise operators weren’t giving correct results and worked around that, but was probably insane) is available with a hint that someone is building an “open source Gnutella Server in PHP5.”
Remember that LimeWire is Open Source P2P and thus pretty trustworthy — and you can always fork.
A few things I heard about at CodeCon outside the presentations.
Vesta was presented at CodeCon 2004, the only one I’ve missed. It is an integrated revision control and build system that guarantees build repeatability, in part by ensuring that every file used by the build is under revision control. I can barely keep my head around the few revision control and build systems I occasionally use, but I imagine that if I were starting (or saving) some large mission-critical project that found everyday tools inadequare it would be well worth considering Vesta. About its commercial equivalents, I’ve mostly heard second hand complaining.
Allmydata is where Zooko now works. The currently Windows-only service allows data backup to “grid storage” presumably a distributed file store as used by MojoNation. Dedicate 10Gb of local storage to the service, you can back up 1Gb, free. Soon you’ll be able to pay for better ratios, including $30/month for 1Tb of space. I badly want this service. Please make it available, and for Linux! Distributed backup has of course been a dream P2P application forever. Last time I remember the idea getting attention was a Cringely column in 2004.
Some people were debating whether the Petname Tool does anything different from what SPKI/SDSI specify and whether either would make phishing substantially harder. The former is debated in comments on Bruce Schneier’s recent post on petnames, inconclusively AFAICT. The Petname Tool works well and simply for what it does (Firefox only), which is to allow a user to assign a name to a https site if it is using strong encryption. If the user visits the site again and it is using the same certificate, the user will see the assigned name in a green box. Any other site, including one that merely looks like the original (in content or URL), or even has hijacked DNS, appears to be “secure” but uses a different certificate, will appear as “untrusted” in a yellow box. That’s great as far as it goes (see phollow the phlopping phish for a good description of the attack this would save reasonable user from), though the naming seems the least important part — a checkbox to begin trusting a site would be nearly as good. I wonder though how many users have any idea that some pages are secure and others are not. The petname tool doesn’t do anything for non-https pages, so the user becomes inured to seeing it doing nothing, then does not see it. Perhaps it should be invisible when not on a secure site. Indicators like PageRank, Alexa rank (via the Google and Alexa toolbars) and similar, SiteAdvisor, and whether the visitor has previously visited the site in question before would all help warn the user that any site may not be what they expect — nearly everyone, including me, confers a huge amount of trust on non-https sites, even if I never engage in a financial transaction on such a site. I imagine a four-part security indicator in a prominent place in the browser, with readings of site popularity (rank), danger as measured by the likes of SiteAdvisor, the user’s relationship with the site (petname) and whether the connection is strongly encrypted.
Someone claimed that three letter agencies want to mandate geolocation for every net access device. No doubt some agency types dream of this. Anyway, the person said we should be ready to fight this if it were to become a real push for such a law, because what would happen to anonymity? No doubt such a mandate should be fought tooth and nail, but preserving anonymity seems like exactly the wrong battle cry. How about privacy, or even mere freedom? On that note, someone briefly showed a tiny gumstix computer attached to and powered by what could only be called a solar flap. This could be slapped on the side of a bus and would connect to wifi networks whenever possible and route as much Mixmaster traffic as possible.
Dido. I think this provides AGI, or a way to script voice response systems using Asterisk PBX and a voice template system analogous to CGI scripting and HTML templates for web servers, though questioners focused on a controversial feature to reorder menus based on popularity. The demo didn’t really work, except as a demonstration of everyone’s frustration with IVRs, as an audience member pointed out.
Deme. Kitchen sink collaboration web app. They aren’t done putting dishes in the sink. They’re thinking about taking all of the dishes out of the sink, replacing the sink, and putting the dishes back in (PHP to something cooler). Let’s vote on what kind of vote to put this to.
Monotone. Elegant distributed revision control system, uses SHA1 hashes to identify files and repository states. Hash of previous repository state included in current repository state, making lineage cryptographically provable. Merkle hash trees used to quickly determine file level differences between repositories (for sync). Storage and (especially) merge and diff are loosely coupled. Presentation didn’t cover day to day use, probably a good decision in terms of interestingness. The revision control presentations have been some of the best every year at CodeCon. They should consider having two or three next year. Monotone may be the only project presented this year that had a Wikipedia article before the conference.
Rhizome. Unlike Gordon (and perhaps most people), hearing the triplet RDF doesn’t make my eyes glaze over, but I’m afraid this presentation did. Some of the underlying code (RxPath etc) might be interesting, but was the second to last presentation, and the top level project, Rhizome, amounts to yet another idiosyncratic CMS, with the idiosyncratic dial turned way up.
Elkhound/Elsa/Oink/Cqual++. Generalized Left-to-Right parser generator that handles ambiguous grammars in a straightforward manner, C++ parser and static analysis tools built on top of same. Can find string format vulnerabilities with a reasonable false positive rate. Expressed confidence that future work would lead the compiler catching far more bugs than usually thought possible (as opposed to only at runtime). Cool and important stuff, too bad I only grok it at a high level. Co-presenter Dan Wilkerson (and sole presenter on Saturday of Delta) is with the Open Source Quality Project at UC Berkeley.
Delta. Arbitrarily large codebase triggers specific bug. Run delta, which attempts to provide you with only the code that triggers the bug (usually a page or so, no matter the size of the codebase) via a simulated annealing like algorithm (the evaluation function requires triggering the bug and considers code size). Sounds like a big productivity and quality booster where it can be used.
Djinni. Framework for approximation of NP-complete problems, supposedly faster and easier to use than more academic oriented approximation frameworks. An improved simulated annealing algorithm is or will be in the mix, including an analog of “pressue” in physical annealing. Super annoying presentation style. Thank you for letting us know that CodeCon is where the rubber meets the road.
iGlance. Instant Messaging with audio and video, consistent with the IM metaphor (recipient immediately hears and sees initiator) rather than telephone metaphor (recipient must pick up call). Very low bitrate video buddy lists. Screen and window sharing with single control and dual pointers so that remote user can effectively point over your shoulder. Impressive for what seems to be a one person spare time project. Uses OVPL and OVLPL licenses, very similar to GPL and LGPL, but apparently easier to handle contributor agreements, so project owner can move code between application and library layers. Why not just make the entire application LGPL?
Overlay Anycast Service InfraStructure. Locality-aware server selection (to be) used by Coral CDN, easy to implement for your service. Network locality correlates highly with geographic locality due to the speed of light bound. Obvious, but the graph was neat. OpenDHT was also mentioned, another PlanetLab hosted service. OpenDHT clients can use OASIS to find a gateway. Super easy to play with a DHT with around 200 nodes. Someone has built capability secure fileshare using OpenDHT, see Octopod. As Wes Felter says, this stuff really needs to be moved to a non-research network.
Query By Example. Find and rank rows [dis]similar to others in SQL using extension for PostgreSQL, which uses a support vector machine for classification (last is not visible to user). Sounds great for data mining engagements.
A Crawler-based Study of Spyware on the Web goes a long way toward explaining why SiteAdvisor must test sites with IE. Cited by Asa Dotzler:
“1.5% of the URLs we crawled in May exploited IE security flaws to install spyware without prompting the user. While this may seem like a small percentage, consider that 1 in 67 Web pages that we examined contained malicious content targeting browser flaws,” while for Firefox “only 0.08% of examined URLs performed a drive-by download installation, but all of these required user consent in order to succeed. We found no drive-by attacks that exploited vulnerabilities in Firefox.”
Amazingly IE still owns 87% of web users (or rather IE-hijacking malware does!)
This year Gordon Mohr had the devious idea to do preemtive reviews of CodeCon presentations. I’ll probably link to his entries and have less to say here than last year.
Daylight Fraud Prevention. I missed most of this presentation but it seems they have a set of non-open source Apache modules each of which could make phishers and malware creators work slightly harder.
SiteAdvisor. Tests a website’s evilness by downloading and running software offered by the site and filling out forms requesting an email address on the site. If virtual Windows machine running downloaded software becomes infected or email address set up for test is inundated with spam the site is considered evil. This testing is mostly automated and expensive (many Windows licenses). Great idea, surprising it is new (to me). I wonder how accurate evil readings one could obtain at much lower cost by calculating a “SpamRank” for sites based on links found in email classified as spam and links found on pages linked to in spams? (A paper has already taken the name SpamRank, though at a five second glance it looks to propose tweaks to make PageRank more spam-resistant rather than trying to measure evil.) Fortunately SiteAdvisor says that both bitzi.com and creativecommons.org are safe to use. SiteAdvisor’s data is available for use under the most restrictive Creative Commons license — Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5.
VidTorrent/Peers. Streaming joke. Peers, described as a “toolkit for P2P programming with continuation passing style” I gather works syntactically as a Python code preprocessor, could be interesting. I wish they had compared Peers to other P2P toolkits, e.g., JXTA.
Localhost. A global directory shared with a modified version of the Azureus BitTorrent client. I tried about a month ago. Performance was somewhere between abysmal and nonexistent. BitTorrent is fantastic for large popular files. I’ll be surprised if localhost’s performance, which depends on transferring small XML files, ever reaches mediocrity. They’re definitely going away from BitTorrent’s strengths by uploading websites into the global directory as lots of small files (I gather). The idea of a global directory is interesting, though tags seem a more fruitful navigation method than localhost’s hierarchy.
Truman. A “sandnet” for investigating suspected malware in. Faux services (e.g., DNS, websites) can be scripted to elicit the suspected malware’s behavior, and more.
This cries out for a photo mashup, so here it is:
That’s the first photo mashup I’ve ever done, so it’s very simple. I opened the protester facing a column of tanks photo in the GIMP, opened the pretty Tiananmen Building photo in a second layer, then searched for filters that would allow me to combine them — Layer|Transparency|Color to Alpha accomplished exactly what I wanted.
I thought this JPEG export at zero quality looks kind of neat.
NB I don’t think Google has done anything wrong google.cn. The appropriate response is not anger with Google, but action to spread the information the Communist Party of China wants to suppress.
I’m not going to make new predictions for search this year — it’s already underway, and my predictions for 2005 mostly did not come true. I predict that most of them will, in the fullness of time:
Metadata-enhanced search. Yahoo! and Google opened Creative Commons windows on their web indices. Interest in semantic markup (e.g., microformats) increased greatly, but search that really takes advantage of this is a future item. (NB I consider the services enabled by tags more akin to browse than search and as far as I know they don’t allow combinging tag and keyword queries.)
Proliferation of niche web scale search engines. Other than a few blog search services, which are very important, I don’t know of anything that could be called “web scale” — and I don’t know if blog search could really be called niche. One place to watch is public search engines using Nutch. Mozdex is attempting to scale up, but I don’t know that they really have a niche, unless “using open source software” is one. Another place is Wikipedia’s list of internet search engines.
On the other hand, weblications (as Web 2.0) did take off.
I said lots of desktop search innovation was a near certainty, but if so, it wasn’t very visible. I predicted slow progress on making multimedia work with the web, and I guess there was very slow progress. If there was forward progress on usable security it was slow indeed. Open source did slog toward world domination (e.g., Firefox is the exciting platform for web development, but barely made a dent in Internet Explorer’s market share) with Apple’s success perhaps being a speed bump. Most things did get cheaper and more efficient, with the visible focus of the semiconductor industry swinging strongly in that direction (they knew about it before 2005).
Last year I riffed on John Battelle’s predictions. He has a new round for 2006, one of which was worth noting at Creative Commons.
Speaking of predictions, of course Google began using prediction markets internally. Yahoo!s Tech Buzz Game has some markets relevant to search but I don’t know how to interpret the game’s prices.
I mentioned elsewhere that I’m on the program committe for XTech 2006, the leading web technology conference in Europe, to be held in Amsterdam May 16-19.
Presentation, tutorial and panel proposals are due in less than a week–January 9. If you’re building an extraordinary Web 2.0 application or doing research that Web 2.0 (very broadly construed) developers and entrepreneurs need to hear about, please consider submitting a proposal.
See the CFP and track descriptions.
Giving and asking for recommendations for worthy charitable donations seems to be popular this time of year, so I’ll do both, following my earlier unsolicited financial advice.
Excepting the very laws of nature (see arch anarchy), aging and its resulting suffering and death is the greatest oppressor of humanity. As far as I know Aubrey de Grey’s Methuselah Mouse Prize/Foundation is the only organization making a direct assault on aging, so I advise giving generously. Fight Aging! is the place to watch for new anti-aging philanthropy.
The most important human-on-human oppression to end, in the U.S. at least, is the drug war (which directly causes oppression in other jurisdictions as well). I’ve only mentioned this in passing here. There’s too much to say. The Drug Reform Coordination Network is saying some of it. The Marijuana Policy Project seems to be spearheading state level liberalization initiatives. See MPP’s 2006 plan. I met MPP founder Rob Kampia a year or so ago and was left with a good impression of the organization.
Wikipedia is the current exemplar of the anti-authoritarian age and I love their transparency.
Finally, you could help pay my salary at Creative Commons, more in these letters.
…
I’d really prefer to give entirely outside the U.S. and other wealthy jurisdictions. However, I’m not interested in any organization that gives direct aid (reactionary, low long term impact), supports education (feel good, low long term impact), exhibits economic neanderthalism, has religious or social conservative ties, or is a shill for U.S. foreign policy in the areas of drugs, terror, or intellectual property. I am looking for organizations that support autonomous liberalization or any of the goals exemplified by the organizations I already support above. Suggestions?
I suppose supporting prizes is one means of donating without respect to jurisdiction. In cases were low cost is important, researchers in cheap areas will tend to win.
I’d also prefer to give via some innovative mechanism. We’ll see what the new year brings.
…
Wikipedia chief considers taking ads (via Boing Boing) says that at current traffic levels, Wikipedia could generate hundreds of millions of dollars a year by running ads. There are strong objections to running ads from the community, but that is a staggering number for a tiny nonprofit, an annual amount that would be surpassed only by the wealthiest foundations. It could fund a staggering Wikimedia Foundation bureaucracy, or it could fund additional free knowledge projects. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has asked what will be free. Would an annual hundred million dollar budget increase the odds of those predictions? One way to find out before actually trying.
…
Of course I expect all of my donations to have imperceptible impact, almost as imperceptible as voting. But it’s all about expression. I’ve increased my expressive value by including a donor comment — “in loving memory of Άναξιμένης” — with my Wikipedia donation. I got an expressive boost when my comment was chosen for highlighting.
(Anaximenes of Miletus was a pupil or contemporary of Thales and has a cooler sounding name. As a kid I’d dedicate donations to Alexander the Great, but I now know better.)
I expected to enjoy Accelerando by Charles Stross and have a really hard time finishing Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow. The former includes cool stuff like mind uploading, space colonization, and singularity. The latter is set in an incredibly challenging environment (in terms of holding my interest)–a theme park. I experienced the reverse.
Manfred Macx, an open source entrepreneur of the future (very approximately), has a kid with his IRS agent luddite wife. They and their descendents carry their family squabbles across the universe and singularity. As this incredibly non-interesting story unfolds, Accelerando takes every opportunity to reference dot com bubble, transhumanist, and obscure political cliches and inside jokes, without any real depth.
Accelerando was originally written as ten stories, many of which won awards, and several of which I can imagine being enjoyable as shorts. The book is way too long.
If you can put up with lots of crapenjoy science fiction, you’ll probably like Accelerando. Everyone else, skim the Accelerando Technical Companion to pick up any missing memes. Peter McCluskey has a better Accelerando review.
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is short and concerns the fate of a theme park ride rather than the fate of the universe. Theme park rides are run by adhocracies. The only way for an ad hoc to take over a ride is to have such an obviously better plan for it that nobody resists–but not everyone wants to play by the rules.
Much is left unexplained (e.g, how does cleaning bathrooms immediately boost one’s whuffie–mass surveillance?), but the core ideas Doctorow explores infect every page, making the book the most thought provoking treatise on Disney theme park rides ever.
What would an economy driven by open source concepts and reputation (post-capitalist but not necessarily post-market?) look like? This is a concern of both books. Neither has concrete answers, but Down and Out does a fair job of toying with the question, cat-like, in its limited domain.
Both authors are trying primitive versions of these ideas in the real world, having released Accelerando and Down and Out under Creative Commons licenses. You can download the books here and here. I commend both authors for this and for even attempting to write human stories about such abstract and interesting topics.
I hate to write about software that could be vaporware, but AllPeers (via Asa Dotzler) looks like a seriously interesting darknet/media sharing/BitTorrent/and more Firefox extension.
It’s sad, but simply sending a file between computers with no shared authority nor intermediary (e.g, web or ftp server) is still a hassle. IM transfers often fail in my experience, traditional filesharing programs are too heavyweight and are configured to connect to and share with any available host, and previous attempts at friendnet clients (e.g., W.A.S.T.E.) were not production quality. Merely solving this problem would make AllPeers very cool.
Assuming AllPeers proves a useful mechanism for sharing media, perhaps it could also become a lightnet bridge–ccPublisher as a Firefox extension.
Do check out AllPeers CTO Matthew Gertner’s musings on the AllPeers blog. I don’t agree with everything he writes, but his is a very well informed and well written take on open source, open content, browser development and business models.
…
Songbird Media Player looks to be another compelling application built on the Mozilla platform (though run as a separate program rather than as a Firefox extension), to be released real soon now. 2006 should be another banner year for Firefox and Mozilla technology generally.
…
Lucas Gonze’s original lightnet post is now near the top of results for ‘lightnet’ on Google, Yahoo!, and MSN, and related followups fill up much of the next few dozen results, having displaced most of the new age and lighting sites that use the same term.
I sadly could not attend last Friday’s mini-conference in San Francisco on prediction markets, but Peter McCluskey has an informative write up.
Apparently Tradesports explained why it makes it a pain to link to its contracts. They want to sell access to the data. I don’t see easy linking and data sales as mutually exclusive, but Tradesports’ current practice doesn’t help it win bigger opportunities (becoming the dominant PM exchange).
A Microsoft representative promoted the use of open source licenses. (Indirectly.)
An implication that real money traders did consider the Bush re-election good for terrorist stock:
[Eric Zitzewitz] showed an amusing graph indicating that Tradesports prices implied Osama was twice as likely to be captured in October 2004 as in November 2004 (implying some connection with the U.S. elections).
With conditional futures voters could’ve been informed of that collective opinion before the election.
Go read McCluskey’s comments, replete with links.
Chris Hibbert is also blogging his summit presentation on Zocalo.
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