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Grants promoting unfettered innovation
From: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Mon, 28 Apr 2003 16:49:48 -0400
Grants promoting unfettered innovation By Dan Gillmor Mercury News Technology Columnist Last Monday, the Open Source Applications Foundation reached an important milestone. It posted some software code on the Internet and invited programmers around the world to offer suggestions and improvements. The posting was an early -- very early -- version of ``Chandler,'' the code name for an open-source personal information manager, e-mail and calendar program. The project and the foundation (www.osafoundation.org) are the brainchild of Mitch Kapor, a key figure in the personal-computer industry, and a talented group of other people who want to create a new, unfettered platform for innovation. They hit another, less-noticed milestone at the end of March, when the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (www.mellon.org) awarded the project a $98,000 grant. The money is being used to see if Chandler -- currently aimed at individuals and smaller businesses -- can work on a much larger scale, serving the needs of huge universities. The Mellon grant was, I hope, a harbinger of something much bigger. As we move into a Digital Age, it's essential that the foundation community recognize a crucial need: to keep tomorrow's information architecture as open, as free for all to use, as possible. This is not an attack on free markets, which work brilliantly most of the time. But markets have failed to serve some genuine needs, such as treating diseases of the poor and dispossessed. The corporate medical establishment's commercial indifference to disease prevention and treatment in developing nations has sparked enormously important work, for example, from organizations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In technology and the area known as ``intellectual property,'' the marketplace has failed repeatedly, largely because of the unwillingness of the political system to ensure fair competition. The emergence of abusive monopolies is just one symptom. I don't expect the Gates Foundation (www.gatesfoundation.org) to do much about market failures in technology, some of which Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates has chiefly engineered. But other philanthropists can, and should, do something to ensure openness in technology. The Mellon Foundation grant to the Chandler Project isn't the first such move, actually, just the most recent. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (www.macfound.org), best known for the ``genius grants'' it makes to innovative individuals, last year launched an initiative to fund projects ``that contribute to a balance between the needs of creators and the public in intellectual-property laws, regulations and practices.'' A few specific areas in the intellectual-property arena that are worthy of social investment by foundations: * Hollywood and the music industry have controlled both the debate and the law surrounding the rights of copyright holders versus the rights of the public. Educating people about what they're losing in this war -- including the commons of knowledge on which new innovation depends -- is essential. Last year, the MacArthur Foundation awarded $1.2 million over three years to Creative Commons (www.creativecommons.org), a project affiliated with Stanford University designed to beef up the public domain by helping authors who want to reserve some, but not all, rights they would ordinarily have under current copyright law. (Full disclosure: My upcoming book will use a Creative Commons license to have a shorter copyright term than the law allows.) * Another disaster in the intellectual-property arena is the patent system, which has all but imploded on itself. The U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (PTO) is infamous for its willingness to issue absurd patents. This is creating a major drag on innovation as companies fight off unfair claims and spend uncreative time and money getting their own, defensive patents. Some foundation should fund what amounts to a legal swat team that challenges bad patents. (There is risk in this approach: It might reward bad behavior at a policy level. Even if the PTO wanted to reform, Congress doesn't let the PTO use all the money that comes in from patent applications to hire better examiners, thereby helping to perpetuate a broken system.) * Several excellent grass-roots organizations have emerged in recent years to promote privacy. Some companies sell products that help Internet users find and eradicate spy-ware, the software that watches what users do and sends messages elsewhere. Savvy computer users can encrypt, or scramble, their communications. But encryption still is not easy to use in basic communications such as e-mail, at least for the average person, and the marketplace hasn't responded. Some organization should seed the development of a robust privacy toolkit that includes easy-to-use encryption. Fixing high-level problems wasn't the motive of the people at Mellon Foundation -- an organization built from money made by one of the ``robber barons'' of an earlier time -- when it gave the Chandler Project some money. The goal was to address a smaller, but serious, problem in the education field, namely handling electronic calendars. Commercial software can do some of the job, but universities have needs commercial vendors aren't satisfying. Many foundations have put resources into technology projects aimed at promoting education and research. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in Menlo Park recently joined with Mellon, for example, to support the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in its move to put online the materials for every single course taught at the university. Ira Fuchs, vice president for research in information technology at Mellon, is enthusiastic about open-source software, a genre that specifically permits users to see and modify the underlying code at no cost. But he's more interested in promoting open standards for use in the educational community, because open standards lead to innovation. When Mellon funds something in this area, he says, it must be made ``freely available for academic use, instruction and research.'' This kind of attitude is valuable, because the liberal sharing of information -- not hoarding for proprietary gain -- has been a bedrock of progress over the centuries. If more foundations will recognize that fact, and act on it in a wider way than they have in the past, they'll be doing a great service for future generations. A lot is at stake, and they have the resources to make a difference. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dan Gillmor's column appears each Sunday, Wednesday and Saturday. Visit Dan's online column, eJournal at http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/columns/dangillmor/. E-mail Dan at dgillmor () sjmercury com ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as interesting-people () lists elistx com To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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