Michael Tiemann of Red Hat chairing. With Marshall Phelps of Microsoft, Chris DiBona of Google and David Hustace of open NMS.
Active audience discusses how to measure innovation. Robert Kaye says innovation should not be patents but patents and discoveries that are actually used and built on. Southhampton guy working on openNMS points beyond R&D budgets as does Sam Jelinek of College of William and Mary (who actually kicked on this line of discussion). Gene Hoffman founder of eMusic talks about not only the rate of change but how change accelerates and then stablizes.
Phelps and DiBona and Tiemann discuss the iPod as an innovation. What is the diff from orginal mp3 players and the iPod? How does innovation fit in here? Is business model the innovation or the design or what?
MT Try to access the option equation of the internet say. Cites: Massive Change.
David Bollier talks about making things free. MT says that more stuff is free now or is it?
Does capital serve society or does society serve capital? Bollier and Phelps and Hoffman are now into it over commerciality. David B talks about the changes in the market. David H talks about innovation in a smaller project and the relationship to his contributors and customers. (sorta the Eric von Hippel talk)
Next topic Google as a word and an innovation. Is the principle meaning of Google a noun or a verb? (MT) Innovation principally a property to be managed or as an activity?
DiBona says working at Google we have an idea about this. Engineers can take their 20% for innovation to scratch their itches. Surprises of innovation by not managing
Marshall says innovation can be directed and companies do that with R&D budgets. Serendipitousness (ouch i can’t spell) is not the only
David H says innovation might not be finding a new molecule but in finding new ways to find new molecules.
Marshall discusses innovation of Microsoft and says the experimental
John Buckman asks about how innovation works at MSFT. Do they use the same metheods as Open Source. Phelps talks about the culture of MSFT. MT talks about the 2 new open source-ish licenses. (not every once agrees that those licenses). End of Certainty (cited by MT). What draws the line between determinism and choice?
Robert Kaye – the good chaos of open source won’t work within a corp
Hoffman – says well known companies are structure models for successful open source projects
MT – customer satisfaction? what happens when enablement is a necessary component of customer satisfaction.
Andy Oram – Open Source is never finished. But windows is expected to be solid.
Wales – what is the danger of closed with protection
Hoffman – some business men would rather beat to market than to patent.
Phelps – hasn’t sued anyone but is defending 40+ suits against MSFT. why can we innovate despite IBM patents? MSFT wasn’t stopped from innovating by that.
Wales – open source cannot license in the same way
MT – space ship one vs the nasa shuttle. space ship one doesn’t explode thanks to fuel design.
MT – cites Montessori: The Genius behind the Science
MP – on software patents. some are good and some bad. he thinks that some things should definitely no patentable. Would MSFT be better off without software patents? Better than trade secrets. Great IP theft by employee story about IBM disk patents.
Having trouble keeping writing here. Discussion getting hot on software patents. Codec research should be patented says Hoffman. He also wants crypto patents. MT says that GH missing the third leg (ouch michael) how to include the community and the relationship in distributed colaborative models.
MP says there is a romantic vision of software about software development.
CDiB – is not happy with codec patents.
Chris Evans – talks about his companies and their experiences with patents. He was earlier on and dodged the IP bullets. Now he’s leary of patent holders who might come in on him.
James Besson – attacks the property model. that you can’t find who owns what is the barrier.
MP – 50% of all patents are overturned on appeal
Sam J – asks where is the failure point?
Shift from patent quality to quality of software says MT
Dan Bricklin – how to make software last 200 years.
Software postmortems mentioned.
What should happen in the next 6 months at the Center? (Center at the Law School)? Dubai’s innovation is a race over their wells going dry. They needed to transform their future without oil and to have it thrive.