Category: Tech

The phone companies are spending large amounts of money, in business investment and lobbying in order to enter the video business. In Texas, SBC just won a victory that lowers their cost compared to cable television by allowing them to start out with statewide franchises, instead of negotiating with each city.
The phone companies have been eyeing ways to diversify away from phone service for decades. In the 80s and early 90s, AT&T made a series of disastrous attempts to enter the computer business after the anti-trust settlement with the US department of Justice.
Video distribution seems a better fit than PCs. It’s a familiar business model, where where a being an oligopoly owner of a distribution channel makes you the leading provider of a service. Owning big servers and pipes is surely a competitive advantage, as is managing an itemized billing service.
The phone companies know they need to slug it out with the cable companies with price wars and features. But cable won’t be the only competition. The market is also seeing entrants with new distribution models.”Long-tail” business like Amazon, Netflix, Yahoo, and Google have the ability to leverage big servers, ecommerce and ad platforms, search and recommendation engines to become major distribution channels. Peer to peer distribution is becoming a notable alternative to get video, and ad models are emerging for p2p. Content providers like the Comedy Channel can host Daily Show clips themselves. The low cost of video is starting to create a generation of video podcasters. Services like Ourmediaare emerging to host amateur audiovisional content.
This is going to make the video business much less of a comfy oligopoly. The phone company will have to fight for the market.

Broadcast contains two kinds of content — things the people really want to watch at the same time, and things that people would rather watch on their own schedule. So broadcast won’t die. It will be contrained to events that a great many people want to watch at the same time, like the Superbowl, or a newscast of a major breaking story.
Shawn makes this insightful point in a comment to Mark Cuban’s blog. Cuban post focused on technology — he argued that broadcast has better performance than internet, and that multi-cast technology isn’t being developed aggressively enough. Other readers take Cuban up on the technical points, but Shawn nails the market evolution.
The video market has been migrating to “personal schedule” for decades. But there are two things that kept “event” and “program” content together. First is a lucrative advertising business model that applied only to broadcast. Second is capital-intensive distribution. It was expensive to distribute broadcast content, so the market became was an oligopoly. That oligopoly was able to create “pseudo-events” — broadcasting episodes of the Sopranos, and only distributing DVDs to BlockBuster video later.
Both of these things are changing. The cost of distribution is decliningAd models are evolving for peer-to-peer distributed content. Mark Pesce’s post from May of this year chronicles how peer to peer distribution of television has become a commercial force in the last year, starting with the Battlestar Galactica phenomenon. Pesce’s article speculates about a number of ways that advertisers will sponsor peer to peer content.
The net result is that the niche for pre-recorded broadcast — whether over-the-air, or on cable — gets smaller. The superbowl will still generate large ad revenues, but programming will keep migrating away.

The FCC exempted phone companies from having to lease lines to internet service providers. They did this by re-classifying broadband as an “information service”, which was ruled not to be subject to line-sharing.
In the words of Light reading the FCC ruled that the physical facilities that deliver broadband, and the broadband service itself are indistinguishable and inseparable. The two things together — the facility and the service — are now called an

Steven Weber’s excellent book, The Success of Open Source is a superb complement to Yochai Benkler’s classic essay, Coase’s Penguin. Benkler looks at peer production as an economic system and concludes that it has become a third major form of organizing production, alongside the market and the firm. Weber takes a closer look inside the open source production process, and provides a fascinating analysis of how and why it works:

• the origin of open source software
• why people participate
• how projects are organized
• how open source fits into surrounding organizational and economic structures.

By doing this, Weber reaches a variety of interesting observations and conclusions:

• Counter to the myth, the open source development process is not a teeming bazaar, with “bottom-up” self-organization composed of local signals. The largest and most successful open source projects have identifiable, hierarchical organizational structures, with a leader and/or inner circle, up to a few hundred active contributors, and a much larger group of occasional participants.
• While Open source licenses protect the right to “fork”, to take the codebase off in a different direction than the original project, projects stay together more than a skeptic might think. Weber observes that project leaders depend on developers and developers depend on the community. The ability to get more done together than separately.
• Developers contribute to open source projects even though most users are “free riders” who benefit from the software, and contribute little or no code. This is less of a paradox than it might seem, since software is a “network good” that gains value the more people who use it. The more people who use a program, the tbugs that are reported and fixed, and the more robust the system becomes.
• Since the origins of the phenomenon, there have been different approaches to licenses. The West Coast, Berkeley-style licenses are easy-going about the ability to include open source software in other, non-open source code, so long as credit is preserved. The East Coast, Free Software Foundation GPL (Gnu Public License) is strict about requiring that redistributed code must always be free software, and any software including free software must be distributed by GPL

Perhaps the most insightful conclusion Weber draws is the relation between open source and intellectual property. Weber observes that open source redefines property around the right to distribute, not the right to exclude.
Weber is able to make this observation because he avoids polemic. Weber doesn’t try argue that open source software is good because intellectual property is bad. And he doesn’t argue that that open source software is bad because intellectual property is good. Instead, he is able to observe how open source redefines property itself.
Weber’s pragmatic analysis leads him to focus on the vibrant intersection between open source production and traditional business, with a look at a variety of hybrid business models, from IBM’s focus on hardware and service, to Red Hat’s packaging and branding, to MySQL’s service and customization, to Apple’s addition of proprietary chrome and polish. Weber predicts continued evolution and innovation and this boundary.
The book was published in 2004, and so it misses one of the most interesting trends in the last couple of years — the rise of open source software that’s not just for hackers. Netscape/Mozilla is included in the book as an example of failure. Weber looks around at Linux, Gnome, KDE, etc, and concludes that open source software may never be able to make software that works for non-hackers. This was before before the breakout success of Firefox, and the popularity of GAIM, an instant messaging client with a consumer-quality interface.
Weber examines the brash and blunt hacker culture, with its focus on technical decision making through vehement debates on project mailing lists that hash out solutions to technical problems and decisions about technnical direction. I wonder about how the culture will evolve as interactions grow with non-geek users, and hybrid companies face decisions that have external constraints driven by customers.
Towards the end of the book, Weber speculates about how the organizing methods of open source software might affect the production of other kinds of goods — writing, music, biotech, business ideas. I thought it was interesting, but less substantial than the parts of the book focused on open source itself, with analysis based on observation.

Dave Coursey laments the End of Innocence for Mozilla with the founding of a taxable subsidiary.

The danger of the Mozilla Foundation forming a for-profit business, Mozilla Corp., is that the result may be as nasty and political as your average nonprofit and as money-grubbing as your typical software company. Nothing wrong with that, except that it’s a wide departure from the egalitarian notion of “free” software that has carried Mozilla this far. And with that departure, I am feeling a touch of loss.

Richard Stallman, the prophet of free software idealism, says that free software is intended to be “free as in speech, not free as in beer”. Open source software never was intended to be free of commerce. You can make money with open source software. IBM makes oodles of money with Linux and Apache. MySQL makes money with its database. You just can’t sell the source code.
I think Mozilla lost its innocence a long time ago, and in a different way. Much of open source software is by geeks, for geeks. Open source developers have focused on creating tools for developers, and avoided the burden of developing for people who aren’t programmers. An open source developer is “scratching his own itch”, not developing code to please other people.
For whatever reason, Mozilla isn’t like this. Mozilla is designed to be usable and attractive for ordinary people, and extensible for geeks. The Mozilla team designs with empathy for users. They have already lost the innocence of solipsism — they are serving others than themselves.

I can’t help feeling that the foundation is crossing a line from which it can never retreat, taking with it a bit of the romance of software by the people, for the people.

Coursey writes these sentimental lines for a salary earned from a magazine publisher that makes money from advertising.
Mozilla is maintaining its license terms. That means that people will continue to be able to look at the code, modify the code, and fork the project to create their own products, following the terms of the license. That’s the freedom that counts — not freedom from being able to make a living.
Thanks, Joi for some clarification about the business structure.

The conversation at BlogHer is about how and whether to break into the Technorati 100. This misses the point of the Long tail— what makes the Blogosphere different from the mainstream media. You can aim to be a top celebrity. Or you can be an authoritative voice on an important topic, and be the media for an important issue. The blogosphere isn’t just about celebrity, it’s about subcommunities.

What about other communications protocols?
Telephone interconnection is mandated by law. For example, Texas law says:

Sec. 60.204. INTERCONNECTION. A telecommunications provider shall provide interconnection with other telecommunications
providers’ networks for the transmission and routing of telephone
exchange service and exchange access.

.
The law is needed because there are strong temptations for vendors not to interconnect. A very quick search suggests that legal requirements for interconnect go back to 1913/
Internet email standardized back when academic institutions were the primary users of the internet. This is very good — connectivity became universal. And bad — the protocols were very trusting, creating a medium for spam.
Fax was born from a standard. In the 1970s, the CCITT (now ITU) created a standard for digital fax that allowed the creation of an industry.
Thinking about these examples, the non-standardization of IM is an artifact of history and business model. IM is a free rider on top of the internet, and is offerered for free. Because the underlying network already exists, IM didn’t need the jumpstart of a standard in order to proliferate, unlike fax. Because IM is offered for free, it is only a minor inconvenience for end-users to connect to a contact, using whatever IM service that contact prefers. So far, the business IM market hasn’t been large enough to force standardization.
It seems plausible that IM will standardize someday. But the current situation could persist for a long time. Currency is an example of persistent lack of standards. There are well-established methods of currency exchange, so differing currencies don’t pose a huge barrier to commerce. And currency providers have a strong interest in controlling their stock of currency, since regional money supply is a tool by central banks used to steer the economy.
Just thinking out loud. It’s interesting how the patterns of standardization trace the social structure and power structure of the underlying community.

Network broadcasting has fallen behind cable tv in audience share. Broadcasters are supposed to switch over to HDTV by the end of 2006, but broadcasters saythey’re not ready and customers are confused.
Instead of switching over to broadcast HDTV, will customers just abandon broadcast for cable, DVD, and emerging internet video? Will the confusion about HDTV hasten the decline of on-air broadcast?
The recording industry switched from LPs to CDs to mp3s without the government having to pass a law. The wireless market is migrating from 802.11b to g, and may get to WIMAX without a federally mandated transition. The requirement for federally regulated standards for on-air broadcast formats seems like a competitive disadvantage for for on-air broadcasting.
File this under “insufficiently informed speculation” — I don’t know enough about this market to have a good opinion. I don’t watch much tv, so indifference to the glories of HDTV maybe clouding my judgement.

At the hearings last week, Chairman Phil King asked why governments should provide network access, when the same service can be provided by private enterprise.
Prof. Lawrence Lessig answered this question in Wired Magazine last week.

Ever think about the poor streetlamp companies, run out of business because municipalities deigned to do completely what private industry would do only incompletely? Or think about the scandal of public roads: How many tollbooth workers have lost their jobs because we no longer (since about the 18th century) fund all roads through private enterprise? Municipal buses compete with private taxis. City police departments hamper the growth at Pinkerton’s (now Securitas)… If private industry can provide a service, however poorly or incompletely, then ban the government from competing. What’s true for Wi-Fi should be true for water.

There’s a range of services like roads, transportation and security, where the government provides services. Even though there are private-sector alternatives, the government plays an major role in providing these services, because they are “public goods”.
The government even put the private streetlamp industry out of business, because it was so much more effective to have city lights on every street than a patchwork of lights in front of a few businesses and rich people’s houses.
The conservative movement is right to question and scrutinize the functions that government provides. The failure of Soviet factories and farmes proved that private enterprise is better at most economic activities.
But there are functions like roads, streetlights, police services, and in the 21st century, network access, where the government has a justifiable and important role to play.

Using current Firefox instead of old Mozilla seems to (toss salt over shoulder and spit twice) improve the memory behavior of the aged win98 ex-laptop by a LOT.
I have seven tabs open, have been checking email for a few hours, and the system seems happily stable.
I still want my laptop back NOW, but daily experience may have gotten less chronically miserable.