Traditional vs. Digital Economies

One of the most profound changes in digital civilization is the emergence of economies that do not play by the traditional capitalistic rules that the West had taken for granted since the time of Adam Smith and the Industrial Revolution. I will briefly introduce and contrast chief principles of the market economy (drawing on Adam Smith) and those of the emerging economies in the digital world (by referring to several key concepts and their proponents).

Open Source Science

I attended an interesting talk on by Daniel Lopresti on a new approach to machine perception at the BYU Computer Science colloquium on Thursday.  Machine perception refers to the ability of computers to mimic human behavior for tasks such as computer vision, document analysis, image processing, speech recognition, and natural language understanding.  Dr. Lopresti is advocating many approaches that we have discussed as part of the free software movement:

• open, shared resources: the research community shares data, algorithms, citations, and other work
• crowd intelligence: people can rate the quality of the resources, so that the community develops an interpretation of which are the best
• transparency: algorithms and results are publicly available so they can be modified and improved by other researchers

As a side benefit, results are verifiable and repeatable.  Beginning researchers can build off of existing work more easily, instead of starting from scratch.

Essentially, this idea does away with the status quo of research in many fields, where each researcher works independently, rarely shares algorithms, doesn't always share data, and runs tests that are limited and not easily reproducible.

by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center

Scientific research seems like the perfect match for openness and transparency. Science is often done for purely altruistic reasons -- to simply advance the truth and knowledge.  The complicating factors are that (1) corporations want to patent their research to monopolize it for themselves, and (2) academics want to keep their data and algorithms private for as long as possible, in order to publish more papers.  Open source science is a big dream, but we haven't yet figured out how to balance these concerns with the benefits that an open source approach would provide.

Electronic Freedom

As a modern analogue to the Protestant Reformation, I would like to introduce several important organizations that fight for electronic freedoms.

The free software movement was started in 1983 by Richard Stallman with the foundation of the GNU Operating System project.  The goal was to create an operating system using only free software, where free is defined using four principles:

• The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
• The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
• The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

Background for The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Eric Raymond

One of the assignments for this week is to listen to a speech by Eric Raymond on the subject of his famous essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar.  It is unclear when he gave this speech, but it was possibly in 1997 at the Linux Kongress conference.

In this speech, Raymond talks about his insights into a programming philosophy he dubs "the bazaar".  His thoughts draw heavily from observations of the Linux operating system development process, which is coordinated by Linus Torvalds.  Linux is free software, written entirely by volunteers, and may be modified and redistributed by anyone.  While Linux has not had much of an impact on the desktop market, it runs about 20 to 40% of the servers on the Internet, and is increasingly being used to run cellular phones.  The Android phone system developed by Google is based on Linux, for example.