dkeats.com

The price of ignorance is more than mere slavery, it includes money Tweet
468 days ago

Last week I was in Incredible Connection (a local computer chain store for those outside SA) to purchase an analogue video capture device so I could build a simple system for archiving really old video material using Free Software. As I was standing at the till, I happened to glance at the person in front of me. He was buying a piece of proprietary software for R1600, and he was visibly upset by the price, but clearly he believed he needed it. It was a stripped down version of Microsoft Office, I forget the name because I don't generally pany any attention to Microsoft products.

In South Africa, R1600 is a lot of money, a monthly salary for many people, more for some. I suggested that he might put it back and download Open Office for free, and he would have better functionality at no cost.

"No, I, I don't pirate software," he said, looking shocked that I would even suggest it.

"Its free software, not pirate software," I said.

"There is no such thing,"  says he. "People don't make products for free."

Shame, poor guy, he paid R1600 for a product rendered defective by deliberate design, when he could have enjoyed greater freedom and saved R1600. Does his ignorance make it OK for him to be a digital slave? Implicitly, it is so.

Thankfully, I live mostly in digital freedom. A side benefit of this is that I almost never have to pay for software, and the software that I use is by-and-large of superior quality. I know this because I used to be a slave.

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Latest movie from my two favorite sisters (Feron: Girl on the Road) Tweet
483 days ago

Peg Norman is my sister of whom no brother could be more proud, and her partner Gerry Rogers make movies. Gerry has been a long time film maker, and has made some really amazing productions, such as After The Montreal Massacre. More recently, they documented Gerry's ordeal with breast Cancer in  My Left Breast. My two favorite sisters, now have a new movie, called Feron: Girl on the Road. Here is the trailer.

Peg says...

"After 10 years, Ferron and her band reunite for a 3 island, 3 concert tour. The film follows them from the rehearsal in Ferrons little house on Saturna Island to the road. Part performance film, part ..."

Can't wait to see the whole thing!

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Copyright in the early 21st Century Tweet
498 days ago

 

I got this cartoon from http://stephenslighthouse.sirsidynix.com Stephen's Lighthouse via Denise Nicholson.  Since it is not copyright, I could not resist posting it here!

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Dealing with 'intellectual property' under uncertainty in South Africa Tweet
499 days ago

In my previous blog posts, I have tried to make the case that at best we do not know whether the proposed 'IPR' regulations are based on likely scenarios, or not. I have also pointed out how the concept of 'open source' is minunderstood. There are areas that I know little about in the strategy, and this makes me wonder if there are other concepts that are equally minconstrued in the document. I have also questioned whether the regulations are in fact implementable in a government bureaucracy in South Africa given our current shortage of high-level, broad-spectrum reseach capacity.

I would like to suggest that these regulations represent a curved surface that is mostly uphil from the perspective of most researchers, with a few small valleys that are downhill, and some of them may well be steeply downhill. Implementing these regulations, with a focus on the downhill parts might well create the illusion that they are working, leaving the obviousness of their disastrous nature to some future time. Of course, I may be wrong, but this is all the more reason to accept uncertainty, and manage accordingly.

One might propose that these kinds of effects could be monitored, and decisions reversed if the changes are negative. However, large scale monitoring of innovation systems is extremely difficult, not to mention costly. There may be better ways of spending the money that would be used for monitoring on -- radical thought -- innovation itself.

When dealing with the amount of uncertainty that the innovation system contains,  it is probably best to follow the precautionary principle. Some ways of following the precautionary principle in the case of the implementation of the Act on which the proposed regulations are based include:

• Leave critical decisions close to the site of the action, where people are most familiar with the challenges and opportunities and can act in an agile manner with the minimum of delays;
• Ensure that the services are available to assist with commercialization of research, including legal services, product development assistance, and that these are available with minimum of fuss whether a proprietary or open source business model is followed;
• Ensure that there is a National fund to help startups fight patent challenges from patent trolls and other holders of spurious patents, especially large multinational corporations with large patent portfolios which may contain numerous dubious patents;
• Recognize that the vast majority of researchers are not doing research that will lead to commercial products, and do not bring the whole innovation regime in South Africa under these regulations, where social and cultural innovation will be stiffled; rather provide means to assist and inform such researchers to find commercially or socially beneficial uses for their research when they tell you they would like your help;
• Where software and documentation in various forms are concerned, accept the National Policy on Free and Open Source as also being an important guide for action among responsible, knowledgeable researchers.

I could go on providing reasons not to implement these regulations, and adding detail about what should be done instead. While the whole frame of reference on which they are based is wrong, the truth, as usual, is simple. The regulations fail miserably in taking into consideration human nature, and the academic culture that arises out of it. It assumes people will behave according to the regulations. They will fail because this is their weak point, and mark my words, South Africa will sufffer the consequences.

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Proposed new IPR Regulations are not implementable Tweet
502 days ago

Before I get into how I believe knowledge products (commonly referred to as 'intellectual property') should be managed given the uncertainties that I mentioned in my previous posts, there is another source of risk in the proposed IPR regulations. I believe that they are not implementable. Even if I am completely wrong, and we can be sure about the things I say we cannot be sure about, they are still not implementable.

If you look at the range of work that these regulations cover, which is effectively all knowledge work undertaken with public funds, the range of knowledge needed to make non-spurious decisions is enormous. The level of talent that will be needed for the imlementing body, NIPMO, to work is very high. These are not decisions that can reasonably be expected to be taken by inexperienced people who have just completed a masters degree. They need experienced researchers, with doctorates and many years of research and development experience.

Such people simply do not exist in South Africa. They could be taken out of the Universities, but then that would undermine the innovation process they are supposed to be managing. So where will they come from?

One could potentially use a peer-review mechanism, similar to what the NRF uses for vetting grant proposals. However, those mechanisms are very difficult to organize, they happen once a year for any group. Here we have a system that has a statutory requirement to respond in 60 days, it cannot be done by busy volunteers, even if those volunteers are paid.

What is more likely to happen is that a huge amount of money will be setting up NIPMO, and it will either be overwhelmed or underwhelmed. My guess is the latter, because nobody in their right mind will take these regulations seriously. But if I am wrong, and people do take NIPMO seriously, then it will be overwhelmed, it will not deliver on its 60 day mandate, and the the entire innovation system will become frustrated, including people working for NIPMO itself. Where decisions are taken, they will be spurious, although to the naive it may appear as though NIPMO is doing its work.

While I might be wrong, there is a risk there, an element of uncertainty. Can we be certain, in today's South Africa, that an organization such as NIPMO can actually be made to work.

The cost of success will be high. It will effectively beome an innovation tax, that will lower research productutivity as a whole by forcing all researchers to jump through a burning hoop of bureaucratic micromanagement. The cost of failure will also be great, but perhaps not as great as the cost of success. Either way, money and - more importantly - energy that should be supporting research will be going into bureaucratic processes that could actually be done better, and be based on what we know rather than what we assume..

 

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Education is the most potent redress mechanism available: let's destroy it. Tweet
504 days ago

Before I get into management under uncertainty, there is another piece to this that has been bothering me. It relates to the incongruity of a political manifesto in support of education, and the potential of the IP regulations developed to undermine it.

Just before today's election day, I was reading the AZAPO manifesto. It uses the example of young Mulalo Nemataheni who passed Matric with seven distinctions last year at Mbilwi High School near Thohoyandou. She is now at UCT studying actuarial science. The manifesto says that when Mulalo finishes her studies, as an actuary, the Nemataheni family will be better than what it is today. It contains the powerful phrase, "Education is the most potent redress mechanism available." This notion, and what AZAPO stands for has made me a firm supporter of the party, even though it has no chance of forming the next government after today's election results are counted.

However, it is extremely disappointing that this IPR regulation is coming out of the department led by Minister Mosibudi Mangena, the president of AZAPO. For this regulation will undermine education at the highest level by reducing academic productivity. Anything that undermines academic freedom will rob people of their passion, and passion is the single most important thing that our academics can pass on to the next generation of academic leaders. These are the same academics who teach the teachers who helped Mulalo do so well in school. This is a risk that is too great to take.

Even if I am wrong, the uncertainty contains an unmanaged risk that is huge and far reaching. If I am right, the damage will be greater than all the potential benefit the regulations MIGHT offer under the most optimal circumstances.  Despite these ludicrous regulations, I have a great deal of respect for Minister Mangena, and I hope he is back in parliament soon! But please, Mr Mangena, you cannot let these regulations be passed. The risk to your dreams and mine for our country is not worth all the potential gains.

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Sources of uncertainty in the effects of the proposed IP regulations Tweet
504 days ago

In my previous post, yesterday, I suggested that there is no way we could know with any certainty whether the proposed IPR regulations would lead to a productive knowledge-driven economy or a social, political and economic disaster, or indeed have no effect at all. I suggested that there are some indicators some indicators that the worse case scenario is at least as likely, if not more likely than the best case scenario. 

There are a number of reasons for this uncertainty. First, and perhaps foremost, there is no strong evidence that a system of patents - one of the key elements of so-called intellectual property - is beneficial to society in any way.  Furtheremore, there is a body of evidence that patents impede rather than foster innovation at the level of society as a whole. The only reason to create patents is because there are lots of other people with patents, and it is necessary to protect oneself from the patent minefield by laying your own patent mines.

When it comes to software,  entering patent space is extremely risky. Software patents are obscure, hard to locate, hard to determine validity for, and hard to figure out where a violation has occurred. Even the suggestion of a patent violation can sink a new venture, and an actual lawsuit will kill all but the largest companies. This certainly applies to software, and I although I am not a lawyer, I suspect it applies equally well to other areas as well.

One of the byproducts of regulations that foster software patents is  a reduction in the number of programmers engaged in software development, thus reducin innovation at the scale of the software ecosystem as a whole. Much software innovation comes from programmers solving problems that they encounter routinely writing software, not from research undertaken with the explicit purpose of making inventions and obtaining patents. Software innovations (or 'inventions' as people who have never written software often call them) are byproducts of software development within a broader context such as research. To paraphrase Richard Stallman, when patents make development more difficult, and reduce the volume and speed of development projects, they will also reduce the byproducts of development: new ideas leading to new techniques expressed in new software.

These are arguments based on reasoning from a set or principles. It is possible to make counter arguments, but the important point here is not whether the above is right or wrong, but rather that at the present state of our knowlege we have no way of knowing with certainty whether the view that I have presented is correct (although with software, logic and reason suggests that it is). However, the regulations are promulgated on the assumption that we do know, and that the alternative view to the one I present is the correct one.

The other reason for the uncertainty has to do with academic freedom. Andrew Rens has blogged about how the proposed regulations are unconstitutional because they remove academic freedom, which is enshrined in our constitution. I will not go into the legal argument, Andrew has already made it. I will talk about it from the perspecitive os someone with over 30 years experience in universities, first as an academic and more recently, 8 years experience as a member of the first management level.

Academic freedom is one of the key things that drive smart and creative people to become academics. We accept lower salaries than we could get in industry in exchange for that freedom. Anything that threatens that freedom, creates great unhappiness, leads to frustration, and can be devastating for academic productivity. Academics are not automatons that can be manipulated by regulations.

Research innovation is something that is made from a harvest of passion and energy, and the capacity for the unfettered creativity that universities make possible. Anything that reduces that capacity for unfettered creativity, and creates the risk of a passion drought will undermine innovation and lead to less, not more, innovation. This is something that I know with as much certainty as I know I have 10 fingers (currently).

Much as software patents favour existing large companies, and make it difficult for a new company to become large, these regulatins will have a small negative impact on the research superstars, but will make it much more difficult to become a new superstar, and will drive passionate people away from research into other carreers. Academic freedom is important to people, and people do innovation. Trample on it at your peril!

Even if you argue against this point, we have no way to know with absolute certainty which view is correct. Yet the regulations cannot work if my scenario is correct, and I expect that the probabilities lie in favour of it.

Furthermore, the success of a product usually doesn't have very much to do with the inventions, the main focus of the IPR regulations, but rather the innovation of how the invention was turned into a produt and brought to market. Just like raw innovation, the fewer impediments in the way, the more likely a product will make it swifly to market and gain the advantage of first to market status. The proposed redulations will not help this, they indeed put regulatory barriers in the way. This is particularly the case with software, where the 60 day timeframe can completely remove any opportunity for first to market status.

Furthermore, with software, we live in a world of perpetual beta. The notion that you first do research, then get NIPMO  permission, then develop a product, then take it to market - which is implicit in the regulations - is utterly absurd. It seldom works like that unless it is a highly specialized product of limited general utility, and even then,  I would expect this chain of events to be the exception rather than the rule.

I have argued here that at best we are uncertain as to wheter some of the key implicit assumptions of the strategy are correct. When there is a high degree of uncertainty in a system, there are ways to manage it that differ from managing a system with a high degree of certainty. I will discuss some of those in the context of the IPR regulations in my next post.

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Managing knowledge products under uncertainty: a view of the proposed IPR regulations Tweet
505 days ago

In my previous post, last night, I ended with the view that the proposed IPR regulations are based on a set of assumptions, and do not take in to consideration the probability that those assumptions are correct. Managing under uncertainty is different from managing under certainty. The regulations assume certainty where none exists.

I have had some experience with such assumptions within large government regulatory systems in the past, and the results were disasterous. In the 1980s, the largest fishery in the world - the northern cod fishery off the East Coast of Canada - was recovering from overfishing. The 200 mile limit had been introduced, and foreign vessels were thus excluded from much of the fishing area, so Canadian industry had built its own fleet of fishing vessels to prosecute the fishery as it recovered. Fishing companies were allocated quotas, based on a whole set of flawed assumptions, paramount among them was the certainty with which stock assessment methodologies produced accurate results. The SMME-based inshore fishermen knew that there was something wrong, and suspected the industrial offshore fishery was taking too many fish. They asked me to conduct an investigation, which I did, and found many flaws in the reasoning that produced the asumption of certainty.

Along with representatives from the socially important SMME sector, I took our findings to the Minister of Fisheries in Ottawa. The Minister listened without paying attention, and came back with the argument that I was not a fisheries biologist so my argument could not be given any weight. Deflated, we left the room, and as I was leaving I turned, and said "Mr Minister, mark my words, in a few years you will be closing the fishery and presiding over the largest economic disaster Canada has seen since the Great Depression." He smiled, and nudged one of his officials as we walked away, defeated.

It was not long before my prediction came true, and indeed the largest fishery in the world became economically extinct, and had to be closed to allow it to rebuild. That rebuilding is still happening, the scale of the disaster was as I predicted it would be.

There are lots of reasons for this happening, but ultimately it comes back to managing something where there is a high degree of uncertainty, not knowing the probability of the assumptions being true, but making decisions assuming certainty and 100% truth and accuracy.

The IPR regulations in their proposed form are South Africa's Northern Cod scenario being re-enacted on a different stage. The system is not a fishing system, it is the knowledge ecosystem that drives a considerable part of our economy, with the potential to drive even more. However, the principles are the same as they were for the fishing ecosystem. Trying to manage it as though we KNOW the impact of all the parameters might produce the desired results, but it might not, it might produce exactly the opposite of the intended effect, or it might rest at a state somewhere in between the two extremes. What is frightening is that we have no way to be certain which state of the system it will produce: a productive knowledge-driven economy or a social, political and economic disaster. There are however, some indicators that the latter is at least as likely, if not more likely than the former. 

I will say more about that in another post. For now, I must head off to my day job!

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Proposed 'Intellectual Property' Regulations are a disaster for South Africa Tweet
505 days ago

The South African Government, through the Department of Science and Technology, has published its regulations based on the 2008 Intellecutal Property Rights from Publicly Financed Research Act. These regulations are based on a fundamental set of assumptions that are almost certainly flawed, and for which the research findings to date are at best equivocal. The first flawed assumption is that greater so-called 'intellectual property' protection will lead to increased business opportunity arising out of the products of research. The second flawed assumption is what I would like to call the 'flaw of assumed homogeneity'. This assumes that it is possible to identify ownership or contribution to what is referred to by the bastardized term 'property' arising out of research.

However, I want to focus on the treatment of 'Open Source' (Free Software and Open Source Software, hereinafter FOSS) within the regulations. I realise that the regulations are using the term 'open-source' to refer to any kind of intellectual output, including journal publications, websites and books. However, lets first look at it in terms of software. If I have time I will write about the other kinds of intellectual output tomorrow.

The regulations stipulate the following in clauses 12 and 13:

As far as I know (and IANAL), the notion of 'public domain' has particular legal meaning which is not the meaning intended in this clause. To the best of my knowledge, according to South African Copyright Act, copyright material enters the public domain after fifty years counted from the beginning of the following calendar year after they were first published (or created, if unpublished). This has nothing to do with FOSS, which retain copyright and use it to ensure that certain rights are not reserved but are inherited as long as the source is copyright. One of the problems with lumping all of the laws related to intellectual output is that the different laws and concepts become conflated and confused, enven among lawyers drafting regulations. You do not put something in the public domain by making it FOSS. Indeed, copyright still applies.

The second aspect of this is that it assumes that FOSS is not a way to capitalize software code. Indeed this is a flawed assumption. There are two overlapping ways to make money out of software. One is to create artificial scarcity by makeing the code into secret software and selling licenses to use the secret software for some purpose. The other is to promote abundance by using a FOSS license and collaborative development approach, and selling services. There is no evidence that creating artifical scarcity is the only way to make money from software in South Africa.

As far as software is concerned, under these regulations, no FOSS could be produced in South Africa as part of a research project. FOSS is fundamentally a community process. You contribute to the community, and you draw from it from the first line of code written. The intellectual outputs happen THROUGH the process, not AFTER the process. Yet these regulations assume that the work happens in secret, much like how secret software is developed, and only then is madee known. They are incapable of handling a scenario where the intellectual output and the products are generated in public at the same time. Therefore, they are incapable of dealing with the reality of research that involves FOSS according to its normal practice and way of work.

Lets imagine for a moment that FOSS could be developed in the same way that secret software is developed. Clause 14 in the regulations tries to give NIPMO some guidelines as to whether to allow the researcher who created the output to make her products available as FOSS, and says (and yes, it actually says "consider the considerations"):
There are other sub-clauses tagged (b)-(e) but they are in the same vein, so I will just refer to (a) above. The clause assumes that FOSS is not commercial, a clearly very flawed assumption when it comes to software. We do not yet know enough about FOSS-like business models for other kinds of intellecutal output, but we do have good examples of some. To make the assumption it is either commercial or 'open' is to create a false dichotomy, and clearly shows the lack of understanding of some of the key principles of both software and other products of knowledge work.

So lets assume that NIPMO has people who know more about the issues than the wording of the draft regulations suggest, NIPMO has 60 days to decide whether to allow the researcher to use a FOSS license for her software, and by implication publish openly about the results of her research. In the world of software and research around some aspects of technology at this point in the 21st Century 60 days can be two generations. But its a moot point, because nobody in their right mind would attempt to do FOSS based research wearing the straight jacket of these regulations while hiding in the intellectual closet that the regulations will foster.

Most importantly, innovation thrives in the absence of impediments. Every time a researcher must go to NIPMO for permission, there is another barrier to innovation. More barriers equates to less innovation. This is a sine quo non, and cannot be changed.  In the last century, two major intellectual developments changed the world. They were the invention of TCP/IP and the development of the World Wide Web. Neither of them set out to change the world. But neither of them would have happened had their creators been working with public funding under these regulations. Listen to what the TCP/IP inventor has to say about the absence of impediments and the role it played in the development of TCP/IP and the Internet.

These regulations will stiffle innovation, not just in software, but in almost every sphere of research endeavour. They are bad for innovation, they are bad for research, they are bad for business, and they are bad for South Africa.

If they are implemented, a few researchers in a few areas will benefit and the rest will be forced to either ignore them, stop doing research, or leave the country. Neither of these outcomes are good for fostering knowledge industries or driving the knowledge economy as a whole.  The system as a whole will produce less research as a result.

This whole thing needs to be reconceptualized based on what we KNOW, rather than based on what we ASSUME. Managing under uncertainty is different from managing under certainty. The regulations assume certainty where none exists. Perhaps we need some new intellectual property injected into the system, one that helps decision makers and legislators understand how to deal with uncertainty. Imagining it away is not one of those ways, and this document is a fairy tale writ large on slate built out of assumptions.

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Reply to Paul Scott's twitter post about proprietary software in schools Tweet
505 days ago

Paul Scott made a twitter post asking an interesting question: 

So I am replying by way of a blog post because its too long to tweet.

Firstly, there is no such thing as a proprietary software vendor. Proprietary vendors do not sell you software, they sell you a license, along with which you get some controlled permissions to use their software in particular versions as deternined by the license and the release schedules. Release schedules are organized such that you are enticed to purchase additional licenses at particular points in the release cycle. The license determines what you are permitted to do with the software, under what circumstances, as well as what you may do with it when you are finished with it. But you do not buy the software, you pay for the license, including its restrictions.

So, lets assume the question is why are proprietary LICENSE vendors invited into schools.

The answer is quite complex, but one of them relates to our material existence in a 3-dimensional world. Most people do not understand the primary difference between software, and three-dimensional objects, and the fact that technically software is a non-rivalrous good. It is non rivalrous because it can be copied and distributed at effectively zero cost (or sufficiently approximately so). The license creates artificial value by pre-empting this non-rivalrous nature, and adding potential legal costs to counter the effective zero cost distribution possibility. Very few people think about this, so they think they are buying the software and that this is the equivalent to buying a car or a sofa.

The second aspect of it that people do not realise is that proprietary software is quite similar in the digital world to what land-grabbing was in the physical world. Therefore, when someone makes an economic argument, its falsehood or veracity are not obvious. So when RMS talks about enslavement, in a way it is true - prioprietary software enslaves its users. The negative impacts of this are both individual and distributed across the population, but the distributed impact is is stronger than the individual impact. This is unlike the effects of drugs which are more obvious in the individual even though they are also distributed.

The third aspect is marketing. The proprietary license smous have a captive market, in part because of the OEM arrangements, and the intertia within the system as a result of past and current OEM arrangements.

There are probably other reasons as well.

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Voltaire: knowledge as the property of all (thanks Jamie) Tweet
508 days ago

Jamie's quote on Facebook got me thinking about Voltaire. There was something that I remembered reading years ago that seems to relate to the world of Free and Open knowledge sharing. I Googled and found it in Wikiquotes:

The property of all indeed. 

 

Voltaire's insights may have forshadowed some of the ideas that go into our thinking about Free and Open resources and Free Culture. He also said "Ainsi presque tout est imitation." (Almost everything is imitation). I doubt that Voltaire would imagine a time when imitation was prohibited by laws designed to protect that which is itself an imitation (i.e. Micky Mouse).

Voltaire was talking about the atrocities of religeon when he said "Truly, whoever is able to make you absurd is able to make you unjust,"  but he could easily have been talking about the subject of my earlier post about software in schools. For as he also said, "It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere." It seems that in todays digital world, we revere our chains.

 

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Secret software Tweet
508 days ago

In my last blog post, I used the term secret software. I had a couple of instant messages asking me why I call it secret software, so here is my answer. I first heard the term 'secret software' from Christine Peterson  who invented the term “Open Source”. She gave a keynote talk at OSCON last year in Portland Oregon, where she used the term.

Secret software is a term that anyone can understand instantly. Most proprietary software is secret software. And secret software in the public sector is more dangerous than most people can ever imagine: it just  should not be permitted for it to be created or purchased with the taxes contributed by people who consider themselves to be a free people.

Nowhere is secret software more dangerous than in government, but it is nearly as dangerous in schools. By using and becoming familiar with secret software without understanding the way in which it erodes liberties, learners become indoctrinated into accepting secret software as if it was OK for them to give up some of their liberty. 

The above are my words, not hers. Christine was talking mainly about voting and related data. Her presentation is  below.

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Kwa Zulu-Natal government to fund Microsoft marketing in schools Tweet
508 days ago

There are some things that happen in Government in South Africa that are devoid of logic, and inexplicable except to the ignorant. Here is one of them.

Read the original at
http://www.sowetan.co.za/News/Article.aspx?id=977718
 

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