Disruptive Tendencies

Should Atlas Shrug?

Yesterday, I started reading Susan Jacoby's new book, "The Age of American Unreason". Many of the statistics she cites have been cited elsewhere, but it was her aggregation of these, and the discussion of the implications, that I have found sobering. This has led me to ponder whether America has any chance of remaining the greatest country in the world, or whether any forward motion is strictly a function of momentum from previous generations' effort, or perhaps through the sheer strength of a very small subset of society. I would wager that to these "Atlases", the US is getting very heavy indeed.

The examples Jacoby uses provide quantitative measures that reinforce what I (we?) see manifested on a daily basis but all too often choose to ignore:

"Nearly two-thirds of Americans want creationism...to be taught alongside evolution in public schools. Fewer than half of Americans-48 percent, accept any form of evolution, even guided by God, and just 26 percent accept Darwin's theory of evolution by means of natural selection. Fully 42 percent say that all living beings, including humans, have existed in their present form since the beginning of time." (1)

In another section, she points out that, in a 1998 survey by researchers from the University of Texas, "one out of four public school biology teachers believes that humans and dinosaurs inhabited the earth simultaneously." (2)

This can't be a shock to anyone who watched the early Republican debates, where fully 7 out of 11 candidates came out as Christian fundamentalists, falling over each other in their attempts to prove their religiosity exceeded that of their opponents. Not intelligence, not competence or experience, but how strongly they believed that the Bible was the inerrant word of god was their primary qualification for running for President of the United States.

How have we allowed this to happen? How have we become so intellectually neutered so as to allow "political correctness" to supersede intellectual debate and discourse?

In his song, "None of Us Are Free", Solomon Burke sings "If you don't say it's wrong, then that says it's right". The intellectuals of this country have been the silent minority, and as a result, are equally complicit in the sorry state of US society today.

In Atlas Shrugged, the intellectuals of the world went on strike, removing themselves, their capital and their productive capabilities from society and physically relocating to a world of their own. Today, it is not just the exodus of intellectual horsepower, but capital flows and competitive advantage as well that threaten this country. In an information/knowledge based world, how is it possible for the US to be competitive with such a pervasive, systemic abdication of reason? And perhaps more importantly, what are the prospects to pull out of this dive?

As in Atlas Shrugged, the US is being held aloft by a disproportionate few - intellectuals, engineers, entrepreneurs. In a flat world, where ideas, capital and people can move with relatively little friction, it will not be surprising if these few "shrug". Wouldn't you?

That's my .02!

Martin Suter 
(martin.suter@iplicensing.net)

(1) "Public Divided on Origins of Life, August 30, 2005, Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life

(2) George E. Webb, The Evolution Controversy in America (Lexington, KT, 1994), p.254

 

Ethical Dilemma Over Linux-based Website

This past week, I decided to add blogging capabilities to this site and was surprised to find that my web hosting service (1and1.com) only has blogging options in its Linux Hosted Business offering. Coming from the commercial software business, I made a conscious choice 4 years ago to opt for the Windows Hosted service. But, I was now confronted with a choice that required some serious thinking about whether the move to open source was compromising my moral code.

"What's he talking about?", I can hear you asking. As an Objectivist (by choice), a capitalist (by default), and an IP licensing executive (by profession), my quandary over open source software really sits at the intersection of these three areas. My moral compass has largely been set by the influences of Ayn Rand in my formative years. Her views on individuals' rights to their own work motivated me to gravitate towards IP licensing. Her view on capitalism (in its purest form), is that it's the only moral economic and political ideology and is the manifestation of an individual's right to their work as well as their ability to profit from it. As a consequence of the nobility of the profit motive, she profoundly mistrusted altruism. Is Linux/open source, software for socialists? Are those involved in its development doing so out of an altruistic agenda? Does its use equate to theft of someone else's IP?

I opted to start with the last question first, and printed off the GNU General Public License that I was required to enter into if I were to switch over to Linux. It's highly readable, much more so than most commercial EULAs, and is eminently clear about the rights and obligations assumed by developers who choose to modify the code base. While everyone has the right to do so, any changes they make must also be made available, as source code, under the exact same terms as the original license - free of charge and without warranty.

Now as a named co-inventor on only 1 patent, I'm not smart enough to be called an inventor myself. I do know, however, that most inventors will say that their work builds on the work of others. "Prior art" is an important concept in intellectual property, requiring citation in academic publications and patent filings. Is the source code that one gets not the same as prior art? What about derivative works based on this prior art?

Two of my favourite words to help answer this are "but for". In discussions about IP licensing, a key principle that arises regarding ownership of derivative IP can be summarised as follows: "But for the existence of the background IP, the derivative work could not have been created." This gives the background work foundational status and means that the creator of the derivative works has a legal obligation to the owner of the background IP. In this regard, I guess that I'm OK with the requirement to forgo any claims to derivative works. Developers decide, of their own free will, to build on top of open source knowing full well what the implications are for their IP.

Next time I'll take a swing at the question: Is open source software for socialists?

That's my .02!

Martin Suter

martin.suter (at) iplicensing.net