I’ve written about Donald Shoup’s The High Cost of Free Parking twice. Watch a five minute video illustrating his ideas.
Side notes possibly only of interest to me: The interviewer is Mark Gorton, founder of LimeWire, and the video is under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license.
Unlike recorded music, parking is a rivalrous good. At first approximation, recorded music should be free and parking very expensive. Of course policy is typically backwards.
The Wikimedia Foundation board has passed a resolution that is a step toward Wikipedia migrating to the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. I have an uninteresting interest in this due to working at Creative Commons (I do not represent them on this blog), but as someone who wants to see free knowledge “win” and achieve revolutionary impact, I declare this an important step forward. The current fragmentation of the universe of free content along the lines of legally incompatible but similar in spirit copyleft licenses delays and endangers the point at which that universe reaches critical mass — when any given project decides to use a copyleft license merely because then being able to include content from the free copyleft universe makes that decision make sense. This has worked fairly well in the software world with the GPL as the copyleft license.
Copyleft was and is a great hack, and useful in many cases. But practically it is a major barrier to collaboration in some contexts and politically it is still based on censorship. So I’m always extremely pleased by any expansion of the public domain. There could hardly be a more welcome expansion than Daniel J. Bernstein‘s release of his code (most notably qmail) into the public domain. Most of the practical benefit (including his code in free software distributions) could have been achieved by released under any free software license, including the GPL. But politically, check out this two minute video of Bernstein pointing out some of the problems of copyright and announcing that his code is in the public domain.
Bernstein (usually referred to as ‘djb’) also recently doubled the reward for finding a security hole in qmail to US$1,000. I highly recommend his Some thoughts on security after ten years of qmail 1.0, also available as something approximating slides (also see an interesting discussion of the paper on cap-talk).
Last month another site for aggregating donation pledges to open source software projects launched.
I’m not sure there’s anything significant that sets Cofundos apart from microPledge featurewise. Possibly a step where bidders (pledgers) vote on which developer bid to accept. However I’m not certain how a developer is chosen on microPledge — their FAQ says “A quote will be chosen that delivers the finished and paid product to the pledgers most quickly based on their current pledging rate (not necessarily the shortest quote).” microPledge’s scheme for in progress payments may set it apart.
In terms of marketing and associations, Cofundos comes from the Agile Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web research group at the University of Leipzig, producers of DBpedia, about which I’ve written. Many of the early proposed projects are directly related to AKSW research. Their copyright policy is appreciated.
microPledge is produced by three Christian siblings who don’t push their religion.
Cofundos lists 61 proposed projects after one month, microPledge lists about 160 after about three and a half months. I don’t see any great successes on either site, but both are young, and perhaps I’m not looking hard enough.
Cofundos and microPledge are both welcome experiments, though I don’t expect either to become huge. On the other hand, even modest success would set a valuable precedent. In that vein I’ve been pretty skeptical about the chances of Fundable, they seem to have attracted a steady stream of users. Although most projects seem to be uninteresting (pledges for bulk purchases, group trips, donations to an individual’s college fund, etc), some production of public goods does seem to being funded, including several film projects in the small thousands of dollars range. Indeed, “My short film” is the default project name in their form for starting a project.
It seems to me that creating requirements and getting in front of interested potential donors are the main challenges for sites focused on funding open source software like Cofundos and microPledge (both say they are only starting with software). Requirements are just hard, and there’s little incentive for anyone to visit an aggregator who hasn’t aggregated anything of interest.
I wonder if integrating financial donations into project bug tracking systems would address both challenges? Of course doing so would have risks, both of increasing bureaucracy around processing bugs and feature requests, necessity of implementing new features (and bugs) in the relevant bug tracking software, and altering the incentives of volunteer contributors.
The World Wide Web Consortium and particularly its Semantic Web efforts do great, valuable work. I have one massive complaint, particularly about the latter: they ignore the Web at their peril. Yes, it’s true, as far as I can tell (but mind that I’m one or two steps removed from actually working on the problems), that the W3C and Semantic Web activities do not appreciate the importance of nor dedicate appropriate resources to the Web. Not just the theoretical Web of URIs, but the Web that billions of people use and see.
I’m reminded of this by Ian Davis’ post Is the Semantic Web Destined to be a Shadow?:
My belief is that trust must be considered far earlier and that it largely comes from usage and the wisdom of the crowds, not from technology. Trust is a social problem and the best solution is one that involves people making informed judgements on the metadata they encounter. To make an effective evaluation they need to have the ability to view and explore metadata with as few barriers as possible. In practice this means that the web of data needs to be as accessible and visible as the web of documents is today and it needs to interweave transparently. A separate, dry, web of data is unlikely to attract meaningful attention, whereas one that is a full part of the visible and interactive web that the majority of the population enjoys is far more likely to undergo scrutiny and analysis. This means that HTML and RDF need to be much more connected than many people expect. In fact I think that the two should never be separate and it’s not enough that you can publish RDF documents, you need to publish visible, browseable and engaging RDF that is meaningful to people. Tabular views are a weak substitute for a rich, readable description.
Hack, Mash & Peer: Crowdsourcing Government Transparency from the Mercatus Center looks like a reasonable exhortation for the U.S. jurisdiction government to publish data in open formats so that government activities may be more easily scrutinized. The paper’s first paragraph:
The federal government makes an overwhelming amount of data publicly available each year. Laws ranging from the Administrative Procedure Act to the Paperwork Reduction Act require these disclosures in the name of transparency and accountability. However, the data are often only nominally publicly available. First, this is the case because it is not available online or even in electronic format. Second, the data that can be found online is often not available in an easily accessible or searchable format. If government information was made public online and in standard open formats, the online masses could be leveraged to help ensure the transparency and accountability that is the reason for making information public in the first place.
That’s great. But if peer produced (a more general and less inflammatory term than crowdsourced; I recommend it) scrutiny of government is great, why not of think tanks? Let’s rewrite that paragraph:
Think tanks produce an overwhelming number of analyses and policy recommendations each year. It is in the interest of the public and the think thanks that these recommendations be of high quality. However, the the data and methodology used to produce these positions are often not publicly available. First, this is the case because the data is not available online or even in electronic format. Second, the analysis that can be found online is often not available in an easily accessible or searchable format. Third, nearly everything published by think tanks is copyrighted. If think tank data and analysis was made public online in standard open formats and under open licenses, the online masses could be leveraged to help ensure the quality and public benefit of the policy recommendations that are the think tanks’ reason for existing in the first place.
Think tanks should lead by example, and improve their product to boot. Note the third point above: unlike U.S. government produced works, the output of think tanks (and everyone else) is restricted by copyright. So think tanks need to take an extra step to ensure openness.
(Actually think tanks only need to lead in their domain of political economy — by following the trails blazed by the Open Access movement in scientific publishing.)
This is only the beginning of leading by example for think tanks. When has a pro-market think tank ever subjected its policy recommendations to market evaluation?
Two points riffing off Paul Graham’s Why to Move to a Startup Hub (alternate titles: Why to Move to the Startup Hub or Why to Move to Silicon Valley). Probably more obvious, but it’s a theme of this blog:
Immigration difficulties might be another reason to stay put. Dealing with immigration problems is like raising money: for some reason it seems to consume all your attention. A startup can’t afford much of that. One Canadian startup we funded spent about 6 months working on moving to the US. Eventually they just gave up, because they couldn’t afford to take so much time away from working on their software.
(If another country wanted to establish a rival to Silicon Valley, the single best thing they could do might be to create a special visa for startup founders. US immigration policy is one of Silicon Valley’s biggest weaknesses.)
I suspect a jurisdiction would have to include far more than just startup founders in such a program to have any noticeable impact. But it’s not a bad sentiment. Even on purely nationalistic grounds, any jurisdiction (and especially large ones like China, India, Brazil, and Russia) ought to allow unlimited skilled immigration, preferably permanent, including citizenship.
Graham also points out the importance of specialized knowledge, emphasis added:
Boston investors will admit they’re more conservative. Some want to believe this comes from the city’s prudent Yankee character. But Occam’s razor suggests the truth is less flattering. Boston investors are probably more conservative than Silicon Valley investors for the same reason Chicago investors are more conservative than Boston ones. They don’t understand startups as well.
West coast investors aren’t bolder because they’re irresponsible cowboys, or because the good weather makes them optimistic. They’re bolder because they know what they’re doing. They’re the skiers who ski on the diamond slopes. Boldness is the essence of venture investing. The way you get big returns is not by trying to avoid losses, but by trying to ensure you get some of the big hits. And the big hits often look risky at first.
I’ve been meaning to do a post on the below for awhile but don’t have a whole lot to say, so I’ll use this tangent: New business practices and models have a whole lot going against them, even if superior to existing practices in theory — nobody has experience making them work. I suspect this applies to peer production in spades. Building up a critical mass of knowledge about how open source works has been slow going and still has a long way to go, and I’m fond of speculating that open content/free culture is a decade or two behind free software. Prediction markets are obviously in the same boat, and futarchy is far out to sea.
And so is every useful business, social, political, or other change (but keep in mind that some things don’t work, even in theory).
By the way, a startup considering a move to Silicon Valley should make the decision with the aid of prediction markets.
As usual, I don’t speak for Creative Commons nor any other organization here, not even remotely. Follow the links if you want officialdom.
CC recently launched its fall campaign fundraising campaign (that time of year again) and site revamp. Boing Boing picked it up and noted one of the best bits:
Creative Commons has launched a site redesign to go with its fall fundraising campaign, featuring a new emphasis on the work being done by CC teams globally, backed by sweet open source code, including OpenLayers mapping and Semantic MediaWiki. For bloggers there are new map-themed “Support CC” buttons to help spread the word.
Yes, CC is finally using what I called the most important software project (to a much greater extent on the intranet; and not mentioned, other semantic technologies I’ve blogged about here), ironically now that I’m no longer CTO. Nathan Yergler has been doing a great job in that role, and 2007 will probably as much visible progress on CC technology fronts as the previous four years.
The CC Salon in San Francisco this Wednesday evening should be excellent, featuring researcher Giorgos Cheliotis (on counting CC licensed works–actually more than that, but the description works with this post’s title) and some very positive announcements, while Jon Phillips will be giving a brief talk on CC at the EFF Bootcamp during the day in Mountain View.
It took a long time to hire a new General Counsel, in no small part because Mia Garlick, the previous GC, set the bar very high.
A few weeks ago I moderated a panel on DRM at a “music technology” conference. I wrote it up on the Creative Commons blog. Short version is a consensus from non-activists that music DRM is on its way out.
But what I want to complain about here is the use of “music industry” understood to mean the recording distribution industry and “music technology” understood to refer to use of the net by the same industry. Similarly, “future of music” understood to refer to the development or protection of recording distribution industry business models in the face of digital networks. Each of these gets under my skin.
My contention is that the future of music is determined by changes in music making technology and culture. The recording distribution industry has just about nothing to do with it. It seems that every new genre from ancient history to present has sprung from the latest in music making technology and cultural antecedents, and developed its essential forms before the recording distribution industry got a clue (or recently, started to sue).
I may be overstating my case, especially with regards to rock, but fuck rock stars.
If you’re interested in the actual future of music and want to look for it in an industry more narrow than “information technology”, it’s the musical instruments industry that you want.
Before this year’s SXSW (which I blogged rather cynically, last post in series, go back from there) I spent a couple days in Houston and one in San Antonio. I was reminded to blog about this side trip yesterday when I got a note from Schmap Guides that a couple of my photos had been used in the Schmap Houston Guide: Hobbit Cafe and Rothko Chapel. Schmap has been using Creative Commons licensed photos to illustrate its guides for over a year, though this one is nice, as my photos are generally mediocre to awful.
Overall I loved Houston, perhaps in part as a reaction to all those who told me I would hate it. Yes, it has massive highways with continuous feeder side roads, but they seem to work pretty well. Other things being equal, I’d like to see cities become more extreme versions of themselves, and thus more highly differentiated. Light rail is a travesty in Houston and San Francisco should become Sanhattan.
For a more sterotypically urbane feel, the Upper Kirby neighborhood is nice. Hobbit Cafe, which I highly recommend, is located there. Montrose, where the Rothko Chapel is located, is even nicer. I was not overly impressed with the chapel, but the nearby Menil is very nice. I felt the building suited very well to being a museum, unlike many museum buildings. I loved the temporary Robert Rauschenberg cardboards exhibit.
Sugar Land seems like an excellent place to tour a wealthy but inexpensive suburb, but don’t order a five pepper dish from Thai Cottage II, for it is artless and not very spicy either.
The Houston Chronicle has one of the best newspaper web sites, which is to say it isn’t awful.
I look forward to visiting Houston again, having not even scratched its surface.
Killing bad products is essential to the health of a product line. “Bad” might mean defective, poor fit, or even merely unpopular.
So I’m happy that Creative Commons is retiring two little used licenses.
