Saturday, September 13, 2003
Northwestern bound
That's my sister and my freshly goatéed self, here in Seattle getting ready to set off for Alaska on the latest Geek Cruise.
Not sure about the beard yet, but I do like the way it looks like I only have one chin.
Carrying on
911 is my latest SuitWatch at Linux Journal. It's about the SCO vs. Reality mess and free (software) enterprise:
Many markets--including some huge ones--are created and sustained by common goods that are free. Linux is about as far from "communistic" as infrastructure can get. It's something the free market has done with the freedom to make itself larger and more supportive of more businesses.
Linux is free infrastructure, created by participants in the open marketplace. As free market infrastructure, Linux creates many more opportunities than it destroys. That's why the problem for SCO and Microsoft is not that Linux and open source devalue their intellectual properties, but that both companies fail to see obvious opportunities in a marketplace that is open to countless participants and unwelcome to manipulative monopolists and litigious losers
Bonus link: Michael Hall's Talking Past Each Other.
Question of the Day
Why don't they call this "Deanster"?
[Later...] Heh: A reliable source tells me it was called Deanster while it was in still in development.
Going deep
Volokh vs. Sawicky on intellectual property. Making you think, on both sides.
Shock from the Monkey
If there's a harder-hitting lefty blog than Todd Morman's Monkeytime, I haven't found it. Todd writes for the Independent, an excellent North Carolina weekly.
Bonus link: Hal Crowther on the launch of the Iraq occupation, in the same paper. Also Relations Break Down between U.S. and Them, in The Onion.
That said, I still don't see anyone on the Left with the same pith and vinegar (or, I suspect, influence) as Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Reynolds.
Semi-unrelated bonus link that goes better here than anywhere else today: Corporation Law and Economics Blog, found courtesy of Denise Howell and Eugene Volokh.
The environmental impact of pissing matches
The Head Lemur visits the patent mess, which we've been writing about for years now, and which only gets worse:
The hardest part of making a structural change in patents is the 'bug' of Intellectual Property, This is a Bug and not a feature. See SCO vs IBM. Definition of patents as IP is the basis of a lot of companies wealth for accounting purposes, resulting in the whole cottage industry of IP litigation. The rich get lawyers, we get the shaft.
Bonus link: Dave's optimism, and Patents of Mass Destruction.
And while we're at it, there's Kevin Marks' Media Heresy - DRM destroys value.