Amazon the Bellwether

On Open Enterprise blog.

Intellectual Monopolies Are No Privilege

We often call copyright a species of intellectual property, abbreviating it, “IP.” This brief paper suggests that we consider copyright as another sort of IP: an intellectual privilege.

When I first saw this idea, I thought it was wrong, but for the right reasons: "intellectual property" does not exist, but calling it "intellectual privilege" is not the way to flag that up. For the lay person, it makes it sound like it's a privilege to access it. Let's call them what they really are: intellectual monopolies - which nobody is going to mistake for something nice and cuddly.

Against this background, I was glad to see Mike Masnick, that bellwether of sound thinking on these issues, broadly in agreement with me:

I'd tend to side more with those who refer to it as an intellectual monopoly, as that's much more descriptive. Intellectual privilege, for all the niceness of retaining the "IP" designation, probably requires too much explanatory baggage.

Red Letter Day for Red Hat

Time to throw those hats in the air, methinks:

Red Hat, Inc. the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced financial results for its fiscal year 2007 third quarter.

Total revenue for the quarter was $105.8 million, an increase of 45% from the year-ago quarter and 6% from the prior quarter. Subscription revenue was $88.9 million, up 48% year-over-year and 5% sequentially.

Net income for the quarter was $14.6 million or $0.07 per diluted share compared with $11.0 million or $0.05 per diluted share for the prior quarter. Non-GAAP adjusted net income for the quarter was $29.6 million, or $0.14 per diluted share, after adjusting for stock compensation and tax expense as detailed in the tables below. This compares to non-GAAP adjusted net income of $22.7 million, or $0.11 per diluted share in the third quarter of last fiscal year.

These figures are important for a number of reasons (and no, I don't own any shares - never have, never will.) It shows that Red Hat has been unaffected by all of Larry's Machiavellian machinations; it also indicates the rude health of open source's bellwether. That's good not just for Red Hat, but for the whole free software ecosystem too.

Google at 500

I don't get very excited over share prices. I've never owned shares, and as a journalist I don't think I should. But the news that Google's share price has hit the $500 dollar mark, although utterly arbitrary, is as good a moment as any to pause for a little reflection.

There's a nice roundup of fun things to know on Silicon Valley Watcher, which pulls out some interesting graphical and numerical nuggets from other postings, and saves you and me the trouble.

But there's one thing to bear in mind against the background of all this euphoria. Google has become such a bellwether for the Web 2.0 generation, that once its share price falls steeply and significantly, it will take the entire market with it. Don't believe me? Just take a look at what happened when the share price of Microsoft, the Web 1.0 equivalent of Google, crashed half a decade ago: pop!