There is more to innovation than secret science and patents!

Opportunities to foster innovation based on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) There is more to innovation than secret science and patents! Prof Derek W. Keats Deputy Vice Chancellor (Knowledge & Information Management) The University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg http://kim.wits.ac.za [email_address]

What do I mean by innovation?
Having a new idea
Implementing it in technology
Taking it through to operation
a business
a new organizational or business process
a new product or service
something that changes the way we do things

Intellectual Property Rights from Publicly Financed Research and Development Regulations (April)
disappointingly modern for a post-modern world
one dimensional

Freedom 1 and Freedom 3 require the source code The four freedoms of Free Software

Barriers to innovation Successful innovation Starting point Knowledge Permission Cost

No such thing as scratch Operating systems Compilers Programming languages Core applications

No such thing as scratch Operating systems Databases Webserver Compilers Programming languages Scripting languages Frameworks Digital object store Libraries Core applications Version management Scalability tools Load balance

No such thing as scratch Operating systems Databases Webserver Compilers Programming languages Scripting languages Frameworks Digital object store Libraries Core applications Version management Desktop applications Web applications Integrated development environment Embedded environments Testing tools Scalability tools Load balance Deployment tools Complete applications Communities use study adapt Collaboration tools

Built on a stack of FOSS applications and libraries using a suite of FOSS development and collaboration tools

The stack Cross platform RESTful API Ajax Mashable XMPP Mobile phone Online package management Version 4 will be fully distributed & cloud-ready Fedora gstreamer GNU/Linux PHP MySQL PEAR Open Office SWF tools CURL Chisimba FFmpeg Java Python Flash Open fire RED5 Javascript jQuery extJS Jabber prototype SWORD Open Zoom

software engineering software engineering software engineering software engineering

Knowledge
When you have an idea, limited coding experience, and few resources, how do you learn to code it?
Free Software as a learning resource
Dissect
Study
Use
Community as a learning resource

Permissions
Every permission is a barrier
Proprietary licenses severely limit permissions
Every permission may also have a cost
It may be extremely difficult to determine what permissions you need early in a project
or what it will cost to acquire them
Even without the cost factor, the permissions alone can be enough to reduce the likelihood of success
Please sir, I want to license two more CPUs

Cost
Start-up costs
Scaling out costs
Lock-in costs
Maleability costs

Some recent major software innovations
Started in parents garage in Durbanville in 1995
Still a student at UCT when he started experimenting
VeriSign acquired Thawte for US$575 million in 1999
Started Canonical and Ubuntu GNU/Linux to give back to FOSS.

Founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were students at Stanford University
Maxed out their credit cards to buy hardware
Became a private company on September 4, 1998
Larry & Sergey #5 on Forbes list in 1997 with a net worth of $18.5 billion each

Launched Facebook from Harvard University dorm room on February 4, 2004
Time magazine named Zuckerberg as one of The World's Most Influential People of 2008
Market value of $15 billion in 2007
Mark Zuckerberg

Scarcity Abundance Proprietary software Free software The scarcity is entirely artificially maintained

Scarcity Abundance Permission Everything is forbidden unless it is permitted Everything is permitted unless it is forbidden Social model Paternalism ("We know what's best") Egalitarianism ("You know what's best") Profit plan Business model drives investment Lets do it, we'll figure something out Decision process Top down, rule driven Bottom up, experimental Organizational structure Command and control, planned and managed Out of control, unplanned, perpetual beta Cost Full cost of all ingredients, permission costs Marginal costs, business process only Knowledge Protected, controlled, secret Shared, freely available, no secrets Starting point Close to the bottom Close to the top -- modified after Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price

Model Characteristics Use existing The organisation uses existing FOSS tools, such as GNU/Linux, and does not contribute to their development. Adapt existing The organisation makes minor adaptations of exist-ing tools to serve its own peculiar business needs. Sponsor a project The organisation sponsors an external agency to create a tool on its behalf, and may assist that agency to locate other sponsors who could join the project. Join a project The organisation puts resources, either money or a software developer, into an existing project. Create a project The organisation creates a new project, puts its own developers onto writing the software and seeks other sponsors or others who may join the project. FOSS strategies Product Process

Model Characteristics Use existing The organisation uses existing FOSS tools, such as GNU/Linux, and does not contribute to their development. Adapt existing The organisation makes minor adaptations of exist-ing tools to serve its own peculiar business needs. Sponsor a project The organisation sponsors an external agency to create a tool on its behalf, and may assist that agency to locate other sponsors who could join the project. Join a project The organisation puts resources, either money or a software developer, into an existing project. Create a project The organisation creates a new project, puts its own developers onto writing the software and seeks other sponsors or others who may join the project. FOSS strategies Early innovation

FOSS strategies Use Adapt Join Sponsor Create Strength of ecosystem Low barriers to innovation

Does this only apply to software?

May be consumed by one consumer without preventing simultaneous consumption by others Consumption by one consumer prevents simultaneous consump-tion by other consumers

Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bush, image from Wikipedia I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the Transmission Control Protocol and domain name system ideas and — ta-da! — the World Wide Web Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the first webserver from Wikipedia When core things are free and open, there are no barriers to innovation. When Bob Khan and I created TCP/IP and a bunch of us built a platform for internetworking, we did not patent the technologies used. We set TCP/IP free. Had we not done so, it is doubtful if the Internet as we know it today would have come into being. The freedom given by Cerf and Khan, and Berners-Lee, together with Free Software made it possible. The original Google servers, from Wikipedia

Bioinformatics
the open sharing of the algorithms and methods used to make new observations from biological data drove the explosion in bioinformatics
Data are often openly shared according to FOSS type licenses
Software is often FOSS and shared as well

Activation energy Publicly funded science?

The world produces 103 scientific research papers per million people

The USA produces 690 and Canada 723 scientific research papers per million people

Africa produces 8.2 scientific research papers per million people

We need to reduce barriers to innovation, not increase them

The output of scientific research that is only published in ways that are only accessible to some people, or that is locked up in the newly altered form of patents that are designed to withhold disclosure and lengthen monopoly privileges. Secret science

Final message
There are always barriers to innovation.
The more barriers you create, the less innovation you will get.
Every permission is a barrier.
Secret science and patents nouveau are not the only way to foster innovation.
Should we not look carefully how public science can best serve the public good?
Currently, we implicitly assume knowledge to be rivalrous, and our laws and policies are based on that implicit assumption.
Don't create barriers, remove them.
Don't control, facilitate!
Say no to secret science with public funds!

http://twitpic.com/qnhpo Dedicated to the public domain. You may use it for any purpose without permission or attribution.

Attribution file: http://www.dkeats.com/usrfiles/users/ 1563080430/attribution/attrib.txt No secret science

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There is more to innovation than secret science and patents!

by Derek Keats on Nov 24, 2009

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There is more to innovation than secret science and patents! — Webinar Transcript