Who’s the boss? You or your computer?
See “How to know if you’ve got an ‘enlightened’ government” (Database, front page)By Jon Fernquest
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1. Five years ago you stored some important documents on your computer, but now no one uses this computer technology anymore. You can’t print the documents or even move the documents from your computer to your new computer. For 40,000 baht you can hire an expert to recover the files.
2. You are setting up an internet forum for your company’s customers to ask questions. There are many low cost Content Management Systems that are Open Source software , written in PHP, and usually provided for free when you purchase web hosting services. You could have used this kind of software, but the people in charge of procurement at your company don’t know very much about computers and hired consultants who installed their own proprietary software. There is no documentation and the consultants are the only ones who know how it works, so they will be billing your company for their services for many months and maybe even years in the future.
3. A professor at a university avoids putting his research on the internet. This makes it difficult for other professors to evaluate the quality of his work which makes his job more secure. If you could use a search engine, you could find mistakes, the names of other professors whose ideas he uses a lot, or even create a bibliography that shows where he got his information. All his research is hidden away in paper books deep in the university library.
4. You’re a computer programmer. One day a patent troll lawyer calls you up and threatens to sue you. He says that the computer program you wrote infringes on a patent that is held by his company. You say you just used common-sense when you wrote your program and you don’t understand how someone can have a patent on common sense. The lawyer says he’ll take you to the cleaners.
Openness is a general concept that overcomes all of these problems. You might even say that openness is the antidote to our increasing dependence on computers. Looking at today's article, what potential problems does the Open Document Format (ODF) solve? (See answer key at end).
As the article points out, the current patent system (regime) has been in existence for a long time and usually provides the right incentives for inventions and innovation. In the internet era, however, patents started to be awarded for general ideas found in software and business processes (See Wikipedia:Software_patents). That's when the problems started. Many people, including the renowned Stanford computer scientist Donald Knuth, have argued that patents should not be given for common-sense ideas or ideas that are almost like laws of nature. Knuth eloquently conveys this idea in an open letter to the U.S. government patent office:
Congress wisely decided long ago that mathematical things cannot be patented. Surely nobody could apply mathematics if it were necessary to pay a license fee whenever the theorem of Pythagoras is employed. The basic algorithmic ideas that people are now rushing to patent are so fundamental, the result threatens to be like what would happen if we allowed authors to have patents on individual words and concepts. Novelists or journalists would be unable to write stories unless their publishers had permission from the owners of the words. Algorithms are exactly as basic to software as words are to writers, because they are the fundamental building blocks needed to make interesting products. What would happen if individual lawyers could patent their methods of defense, or if Supreme Court justices could patent their precedents? (Source)
A good vocabulary building exercise is to try and match the “six tests that an open standard must pass” given in the box at the top of the article with the “five key qualities to an open standard” given in the article (see answer key at end):
1. interoperable
2. user-centric
3. cooperative
4. sustainable
5. scalable
6. flexible
Vocabulary (in discussion above)
dependence on – reliance on, needvulnerable – easily harmed by something
recover files – get computer files back (after the files were lost due to a computer problem)
proprietary software – a company owns the software (so there are strict controls on how you can use it, this makes you very dependent on the owner of the software) (See Wikipedia:Proprietary_software)
internet forum – a website for discussions of various topics (See Wikipedia:Internet_forum)
Content Management Systems – a system for organizing online documents, content, and information and getting feedback, comments, and discussion about it (See Wikipedia:Content_management_system)
Open Source Software – software available which is open to everyone to study, change, and improve its design (See Wikipedia:Open_source_software).
PHP – a computer programming language for the internet (See Wikipedia:PHP)
web hosting services - monthly rental of a place to build a website (See Wikipedia:Web_hosting_services)
procurement – obtaining the supplies and services that a company needs
billing – sending a bill for consulting services given
to sue someone – to use the legal system to get money from someone who you believe has damaged you
to take you to the cleaners – to get a lot more money from you for something than a reasonable amount, for example a used car salesman sells you a car for much more than it's worth
commmon-sense - how any reasonable human being would solve some kind of problem
antidote - something that helps you overcome a difficult situation (antidotes stop the effects of poisons on your body)
an open letter - a letter of protest written to one person but intended to be read by a wider audience or the general public
renowned - well-known, famous
eloquently - ideas are expressed well and are persuasive
fork (software development) - open source software licenses usually allow developers to start their own version of a software package if they want to (See Wikipedia:fork)
Vocabulary (in article)
enlightened – has a modern and sensible way of dealing with thingsopen standards – standards that are publicly available to all in a book or over the internet (See Wikipedia:Open_standards)
interoperability – compatible, can work together (for example my DVD player is interoperable with my TV set) (See Wikipedia:Interoperability and Wikipedia:Business_process_interoperability)
procurement – obtaining the supplies and services that a company needs
mandate – given the official authority to do a task (usually by the government)
Open Document Format (ODF) – a standard for documents stored on computers, if everyone follows the standard than in the future there will be less of a problem reading documents when technologies change (See Wikipedia:Open_document_format)
promulgate – to officially announce a law so that people know about it
on the cusp of – at a changing point (in mathematics a cusp is where a curve changes direction)
ICT – Information and Communications Technology (Information Technology, Telecommunications and Data Networking Technologies are converging into a single technology, see Wikipedia:Technological_convergence)
the engine of growth – the thing that causes growth
closed system – only the owner can modify the system (to use it for new purposes)
open system – everyone can modify the system
fosters – helps develop
locking out – making it so that people cannot access and use something
picking up speed – accelerating, going faster and faster
technical reference model – a shared model of how software works that helps different pieces of software work together (For example see US_Federal_Enterprise_Architecture)
e-government – using computer and internet technologies to enhance the effectiveness of the legislature, judiciary or administration (See Wikipedia:Egovernment)
IP – intellectual property (nowadays ideas, information, artwork, and writing can also be property owned by someone, in the past you could only own physical property) See Wikipedia:Intellectual:Property)
patents – ownership rights over the ideas in an invention, for example over new drugs to treat AIDS (See Wikipedia:Patents)
business processes – the steps in different business tasks, for example the steps that a cashier gos through when a customer pays for a purchase (See Wikipedia:Business_process_management, Wikipedia:Business_process_modelling)
patent trolls – people who use patents to make money by sueing people for patent infringement instead of using the patent productively in a business (See Wikipedia:Patent_troll)
cripple – to damage something so that it does not work properly
the fundamental premise – the most important assumption
framework - a set of rules, ideas, or beliefs used to deal with a certain kind of problem
pandemics – something that affects many people over a wide area (originally meant a disease)
bypassed – did not keep up with the rest of the world, fell behind the rest of the world, like for example the country of Myanmar
More things to read and do
1. Here is an explanation of one of the most notorious software patents of the internet era, the Amazon One-Click Shopping Patent, from a Stanford computer science course.
Answer Key:
1. Potential problems that the Open Document Format (ODF) solves:
a. “…governments are generating masses of information that may be unreadable in 15 or 20 years.”
b. “a governments digitized records cannot be read if:
i. the vendor collapses,
ii. is taken over or
iii. just simply does not have the investment to maintain their software.”
c. In one hundred years the following types of data may be inaccessible:
i. “your country’s intellectual property”
ii. government records
iii. libraries
2. Matching the “six tests that an open standard must pass” with the “five key qualities to an open standard” (note: there is no one right answer). The six tests:
1. Must not be under the complete control of anyone or any one company. [cooperative, all companies cooperate, also sustainable, open source projects that come under the control of one company end up losing all their programmers who usually work for free, for an example see the Mambo project and the Joomla project that forked off of Mambo]
2. The way to come up with the specifications must be transparent. [cooperative, transparency means the specifications are not hidden from anyone]
3. The standards must work on any operating system or platform. [interoperable, scalable meaning you can run it on your PC or remote Linux-Apache server, for example the Awstats program for analyzing web traffic are often run on PCs rather than hosting service servers because they use a lot of processor bandwidth]
4. The documentation must be open and must be accessible for people to see. They must not be expensive or guarded by NDA (non-disclosure agreement). [user-centric, users can get documentation easily]
5. The ideas must be available under a free or under RAND (reasonable and non-discriminatory) policies. [flexible, proprietary software licenses place many restrictions on the user]
6. The specifications must be accepted by the masses and do not have to be recognised or certified by any one government. [user-centric, users = masses]