What is the point of being famous and respected if you can't speak heresy about your own movement. What is the point?
One of my heretical opinions is that we worry way too much about licensing. And in particular; I don't think we really need reciprocal licensing. I don't think we need licenses like the GPL, that punish people for taking code closed-source. Let me explain what I think. And then I'll explain [why] the fact we don't actually need those [licenses] matters.
I don't think we need them because. There has been a fair amount of economic analysis done in the last 10 years, significant amount of it has been done by, well, me. Which seems to demonstrate that open source is what the economist call a more efficient mode of production use, superior mode of production. You get better investment, better return out of the resources you invested by doing open source development than closed source development. In particular, there have been a number of occasions on which people have taken open source products that were reasonable successful, and just taken them closed. Effectively putting them under proprietary control, proprietary licensing and then tried to make a business model out of that. They generally fail. And the reason they fail is pretty simple. That is because when you take a product closed, you are now limited to what ever small number of developers that your corporation can afford to hire. The open source community that you just turned your back on does not, they have more people than you. They can put out releases more frequently, getting more user feedback. So the suggestion is, simply because of the numerical dynamics of the process: taking open software closed is something that the market is going to punish. You are going to loose. The inefficiencies inherent in closed source development are eventually going to ambush you, going to [inaudible] you, and your are not going to have a business model or product anymore. We've seen this happened number of times.
But now, lets look at the implications of taking this seriously. The question I found myself asking is: if the market punished people for taking open source closed, then why do our licenses need to punish people for taking open source closed? That is why I don't think you really need GPL or a reciprocal licenses anymore. It is attempting to prevent the behavior that the market punishes anyway. That attempt has a downside, the downside is that people, especially lawyers, especially corporate bosses look at the GPL and experience fear. Fear that all of their corporate secrets, business knowledge, and special sauce will suddenly be everted to the outside world by some inadvertent slip by some internal code. I think that fear is now costing us more than the threat of [inaudible]. And that is why I don't we need the GPL anymore.
The Bernie Madoffs of the world — not just the Ponzi schemer himself but the rogue accountants, lawyers and hedge funders — walk meekly into federal courts with their rictus faces and ashen complexions and the expectation of long prison sentences, and a bystander can’t help but wonder: Skip to next paragraph Enlarge This Image Henner Frankenfeld/Bloomberg News
SETTLING DOWN Jacob Alexander, wanted on fraud charges, has made a home in Namibia.
Seth's Blog: The myth of big salaries (it's all marketing)
Topic: Business
9:56 am EDT, Mar 23, 2009
Twenty years ago, financial industry salaries were a tiny fraction of what they are today. Did lesser people do the work? Did they try less hard? Think smaller thoughts? Of course not. The reasons salaries are high is that the number is a signaling mechanism, a very expensive marketing campaign.
Law firms went through this cycle twenty years ago. The top firms competed with each other to recruit a too-small pool of talent from the top law schools. Unable to muster up even a mite of marketing insight, they chose to compete on only one axis: salary. So, 24 year olds were given jobs at $120,000 a year, when their peers from college were making 20% of that. The firms could have found great people at half the price, except that with only one axis, they had to be at the top if their peers were.nullnull
Twitpay has raised an undisclosed amount of angel financing and will launch a service that allows users to order and buy downloadable content, via Twitter.
The Atlanta-based social payments startup, launched four months ago, allows users to make payments of up to $1,000 through the micro-blogging phenomenon that Twitter has morphed into.
Twitpay is part of an eco-system of services and applications that is transforming Twitter from a social media site into a communications — and now an ecommerce — platform.
CEO Michael Ivey was tight-lipped on the details of the fundraise. After some prodding, he ventured to say that seed funding for Internet startups at Twitpay’s stage is generally less than $300,000.
Congratulations to Twitpay, the hottest concept to come out of Atlanta in some time.
Cloud Compute, Cloud Server, Cloud Servers, On Demand Server @ Mosso
Topic: Technology
9:44 pm EDT, Mar 18, 2009
Cloud Servers vs. Amazon EC2
We're often asked how Cloud Servers compares to Amazon EC2. The products are different in a few key areas, and the differences can be important depending on the needs of your application. Here's a few key points to consider:
flynn23 wrote: You want the best and brightest to be compensated, with really, no limit.
In this case I think what is frustrating is that we're not talking about "best" or "brightest" but "closest to the money." We have examples of performance bonuses being paid out by companies that are, for all intents and purposes, bankrupt. I'm all for profit sharing by successful companies, but paying it out when your company is bankrupt and being propped up by the federal government is nonsensical. There are no profits to share, so what, exactly, are you sharing? The argument that "we have to do this or we'll loose talented guys" is a non-starter in this environment. No one in the banking industry is on a hiring binge right now. The last thing anyone in any industry wants at this moment is to be on the street looking for work. Those words are a code for something else - something which becomes clear when you look at how AIG's bonuses are structured.
In the case of AIG we're not talking about profit sharing. These are retention bonuses that were negotiated last January when it ought to have been clear to those close to this disaster what was about to go down. These people demanded more money or they would simply walk away from the mess they had created. They've squirreled away enough money at this point that they don't have to work again for the rest of their lives. They clearly threatened, when the going got sour and it was clear that there weren't going to be profits for performance bonuses, that they were unwilling to work at their salary level, and a substitute bonus must be created - or they'd leave.
AIG was not afraid of loosing talent. They were afraid of loosing money. They had billions wrapped up in this stuff. It was about to explode. Their traders were the only people who understand all of it. If those traders left, it will be more difficult to unravel, and more money would be lost.
Imagine if you had a software developer working a piece of code that was extremely complicated, required daily maintenance, and cost billions every day if it broke. And the guy wanted to quit. The million you'd pay him not to quit would cost you less than what you'd loose while the next guy came up to speed on how to maintain the thing.
Basically, these people have gotten themselves into a position where they are responsible for billions of dollars, and they are blackmailing the management of AIG and the United States Government. We have to pay them millions or they will walk away, and we know that will cost us even more. Thats why the Treasury hems and haws about clawing back the bonuses but doesn't do anything effective. They know they're fucked. The banksters have a gun to their heads.
This isn't a case of rewarding talent. This is blackmail. And I don't think its illegal - I don't think prosecutions are coming unless evidence of book cooking comes to light. In this case these bonuses are intentionally disconnected from profits so there is no benefit to cooking the books.
It speaks to a more fundamental disconnect between our idealistic notions of talent and merit and the actual economy that we have, in that its not really about talent - its about what you control. Account executives are typically far better compensated than engineers, for example, not because what they are doing is objectively more important, but because they directly control access to revenue...
It's fun to pause between dances on the video, then read some more of this post, go back and watch the next dance...because this is what was happening in my head. Truly it was. Talk, talky, talk---The Biz Markie!---talkity, talk, talk---Snake it down now!--talk... At some point, I excused myself to the restroom in order to release my inner Salt n Pepa. Yep. Totally did the Cabbage Patch/Snake/MC Hammer combo in the bathroom all by myself in the mirror. And laughed some more.null
