Difference between revisions of "Talk:Lecture 2"

Revision as of 13:26, 8 October 2004

Lecture 2 Discussion

Welcome to the Discussion Page for Lecture 2. Please use the + sign in the top of the screen to add comments to the page.

Open Source Impact On Research

I was wondering what sort of impact the open source movement had on research and development in the IT world? It seems to me that the IT culture of sharing tools and resources in an "open" environment maybe a factor of increasing technology advances even with little money spent on Research and Development. I would think this would not be the case with other industries; perhaps because other industries can’t produce these tools at “zero cost”. I understand that many "open source" projects have been funded by industry, and university alike, but it is also my perception, maybe it is a misperception that a large number of private individuals contribute to the open source community. It would be interesting to see information to prove or disprove this theory, and to see in the future if the open source culture will continue to grow or if it will give way to perhaps a more standard economic model.

Are you considering pieces of open-source software to be "technology advances" themselves, or are you focusing on how open-source tools and libraries make it easier to write new software? Are you using "technology advance" in a narrow sense that includes only clever things like rsync and bayesian spam filtering, or does any improvement over competing software constitute a technology advance? I believe that proprietary, hidden-source software is a more recent phenomenon than open-source software. By the way, I am one of those "private individuals" who contributes to open-source software (specifically, Mozilla and Firefox). --Jesse Ruderman

Matching royalties instead of fixed subsidies

In lecture, we saw how subsidies supplementing patent royalties can cause desirable research to happen. The research is desirable because v - c > 0, but it doesn't happen without help because πv - c < 0. (π is the fraction of value that the patent holder can receive in royalties.) As we can see from the graphs on page 3 of the slides, subsidies fund some useless projects (v - c < 0) unless the funder requires matching payments, and more importantly, subsidies fail to fund some expensive research where v - c is small but positive. I have an idea that seems to solve both of these problems: promise to match patent royalties paid by other companies at a fixed ratio. If the funder estimates π correctly and chooses the ratio m such that (1+m)π = 1, then projects will procede when and only when v - c > 0. --Jesse Ruderman