Showing posts with label commodification. Show all posts
Showing posts with label commodification. Show all posts

16 January 2009

Why Open Source is Eclipsing Everything Else

A name that I don't know as well as I should is Grady Booch:

chief scientist at IBM's Rational Software unit and an IBM fellow who also holds the title "free radical." His software development approach and the Unified Modeling Language, which he helped create, have been used to build the software that runs pacemakers, avionics in certain large airliners, antilock brake systems, and financial trading systems in the U.S., Europe and Asia....

On Open Enterprise blog.

12 October 2007

Copyright Olympics

Good to see an eminent writer getting it:

It's not just that the idea of copyrighting an entry in the English dictionary, or someone's face, haircut or name, is ridiculous. There is an issue of principle. By declaring images, titles and now words to be ownable brands, these various organisations and individuals are contributing to an increased commodification and thus privatisation of materials previously agreed to be in the public domain. For scientists, this constrains the use of public and published knowledge, up to and including the human genome. For artists, it implies that the only thing you can do with subject matter is to sell it.

(Via TechDirt.)

27 February 2007

The Enclosure of the Starbucks Experience

Here's an insightful piece:

Let’s face it: a brand is all about creating a monoculture. It is all about efficiencies, bureaucratization of process, and the marketing of a single cultural image. It is all about carefully crafting an experience and then monetizing it. The commodification of experience is the polar opposite of what a commons offers. In this case, the market is trying to replicate that which only the commons can truly generate.

As more and more companies seek to emulate Starbucks, and to tap into the power of the commons, this paradox is one that will increasingly crop up. It hints, perhaps, that the commons simply does not scale.