The Anti-Intellectual Monopolies Trust

Apparently, there's something called the Intellectual Property Education Trust, a UK registered charity, with lots of dosh to give away:

"The Intellectual Property Education Trust proposes to make a closing award in the region of £25,000 for the promotion of education in the field of intellectual property, and seeks applications from interested institutions.

The Trust was established in 1995 with the object to advance education and promote research in the law and practice of Intellectual Property. The Trust proposes to make a final substantive award with its remaining funds. Institutions interested in making an application for the award should first notify the Trust's secretary by phone (01458 270 882) or email by 28 February 2009 with an expression of interest, and should submit a formal application by 17 April 2009.

So long as the purpose of the application is within the above object of the Trust, there are no other limitations on the nature of the application. Thus the award may be given, purely by way of example, for the preparation of courses or course materials, the establishment of courses, the award of bursaries to assist students to attend courses, or the preparation of material to educate the public at large.

Maybe it's time to set up an Anti-Intellectual Monopolies Trust: anyone want to fund it?

Haggling in the Bazaar

As open source becomes more widely used, people have started exploring how and why its approach to developing software works so well. The pioneering analysis here is Eric Raymond's Cathedral and the Bazaar, but that was largely describing a prelapsarian world of free software with little commercialisation. An intriguing question is how the bazaar functions in the corrupting presence of serious dosh....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Microsoft Gives a Big Hug to ISO SC34...

...and some dosh.

Less Dosh for OSS...And So?

On Open Enterprise blog.

When Eben Met Tim

I've always felt rather ambivalent about Tim O'Reilly. On the one hand, he is undoubtedly a very shrewd reader of markets, and has undoubtedly contributed hugely to the rise of the open source movement. On the other, he always seems to take what might be called an extreme pragmatist position, where questions of making plenty of dosh always seem to be lurking in the background (and sometimes in the foreground).

I'm glad to see it's not only me:

At the O'Reilly Open Source Convention today, Software Freedom Law Center director Eben Moglen threw down the gauntlet to O'Reilly founder and CEO Tim O'Reilly. Saying that O'Reilly had spent 10 years making money and building the O'Reilly name, Moglen invited O'Reilly to stop being "frivolous" and to join the conversation about software freedom.

So it's really a matter of whether your on Eben's side, or Tim's side....

Selling Off the Family Spectrum Commons

Radio frequencies form a commons for each country. Mostly these have been enclosed through auctions selling them to the highest bidder. Whether that's a good idea is another matter, but assuming for a moment that you think it is, at the very least you'd try to get plenty of dosh for this precious resource.

Well, according to this fascinating, and extremely thorough, paper, that didn't happen in the US:

According to calculations presented in this paper, since 1993, the government has given to private interests as much as $480 billion in spectrum usage rights without public compensation. That comes to more than 90 percent of the value of spectrum usage rights it has assigned from 1993 through the present.

Now, admittedly "as much as $480 billion" includes zero, but I don't think that's the case here. We're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars that the US public won't be getting. Which means that there are some companies - and corporate fatcats - who are richer by the same amount.

So, how about if we start treating like a commons instead? That way, you can be sure that everyone gets their fair share - unlike the situation in America.

Second Life by Numbers

Here's a fun list of financial figures associated with Second Life. The really significant one is the following:

652,581 USD - Real dollars spent in SL in the last 24 hours.

- not least because it hasn't wavered during all of the CopyBot kerfuffle, despite what all the gloom merchants were saying.

Speaking of which, I have a piece in the Guardian on the subject, mind-melded with some background to how Second Life came about. The basic message is: Don't Panic.

Open Content: Some Get It, Some Don't

Larry Sanger (who does) explains to Jason Calcanis (who doesn't) what all this open content is really about - and why it isn't going away once companies start waving fistfuls of dosh in the air.

The Birth of Emblogging

I've written before about the blogification of the cyber union - how everything is adopting a blog-like format. Now comes a complementary process: emblogging, or embedding blogs directly into other formats.

This flows from the observation that blogs are increasingly at the sharp end of reporting, beating staider media like mere newspapers (even their online incarnations) to the punch. There is probably some merit in this idea, since bloggers - the best of them - are indeed working around the clock, unable to unplug, whereas journalists tend to go home and stop. And statistically this means that some blogger, somewhere, is likely to be online and writing when any given big story breaks. So why not embed the best bits from the blogs into slow-moving media outlets? Why not emblog?

Enter BlogBurst, a new company that aims to mediate between those bloggers and the traditional publications (I discovered this, belatedly, via TechCrunch). The premise seems sensible enough, but I have my doubts about the business model. At the moment, the mainsteam media get the goods, BlogBurst gets the dosh, and the embloggers get, er, the glory.

Still, an interesting and significant development in the rise and rise of the blog.