Value and Veracity

You don’t see too much historical content on this blog, but I can’t pass on posting a discovery this big.

Shortly before the Civil War, the US Army Camel Corps employed a few dozen camels for transportation across the American deserts, where horses and mules fared poorly. Despite some success, the USCC was soon dissolved, but not before leaving behind a grand legacy. Be sure to read the story of the Red Ghost. You know those legends about headless horsemen? Well, there really was a headless camel rider that terrorized the American Southwest for a decade!

I am very disappointed in my high school’s American History class for skipping this.

The AtGoogleTalks YouTube channel features great lectures from writers, academics, and politicians. Probably the best thing about them is that Google employees tend to ask excellent questions.

Watch Paul Krugman’s if you want to learn a bit about the subprime crisis. Stiglitz on globalization was quite good, too.

Thanks, Jamie!

Whether you’re concerned about file sharing and the RIAA, software innovation, or the high prices of patent-protected drugs, you probably have strong feelings about intellectual property right now.

I worry that we’re seeing to much anti-intellectual-property propaganda these days. The term “imaginary property” is a distracting one, for it frames an important cost-benefit issue as a philosophical one. There are great arguments supporting the claim that we need less intellectual property protection. Maybe it’s the case that it’s too costly to try to regulate mp3 downloads; maybe it’s more productive in the long run for the software industry run to use open source; and maybe the pharmaceutical companies are making more money than they deserve.

However, framing intellectual property as “imaginary property” suggests that there is something wrong with the concept of owning ideas. This sort of rhetoric isn’t going to convince anybody, for the ownership of ideas was a good idea in 1623., and it still is now.

Extolling the ideals of open science or open source, or citing the harms of patent-induced monopolies, will never work, for the counterargument is too easy: intellectual property gives the private sector an incentive to innovate, and innovation is good for everybody. The question is whether the benefits of increased innovation outweigh the costs of creating a temporary monopoly. Making progress in the intellectual property can only come from addressing that cost-benefit calculation.

It’s not enough to point out how unfair the RIAA is. I’ve seen rather short-sighted arguments noting how the revenues from file-sharing settlements is not being passed on to the artists. But that’s not the point. The benefit to artists, if there is any, would be indirect: the lawsuits discourage file sharing, which increases cd sales, which makes record deals more profitable for labels, which means record deals will pay artists more. On the other side, it’s nonproductive to point out that file sharing is illegal or hurts artists; the debate here is whether the law is any good. And it may be the case that artists would profit more in a society where digital music could be freely shared. The increased publicity for emerging artists might lead to bigger audience and more money from live performances. Perhaps this effect won’t make up for the big bucks of record deals, but it would be reasonable to argue that the current system, with millions stealing music and only a few thousand unlucky individuals paying the price, can’t possibly be efficient. Especially when Radiohead has shown that giving away music can be profitable.

With innovation (in software and medicineespecially), again there is far too much philosophical rhetoric when this is really just a cost-benefit issue. In his talk at Google, Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz provides a persuasive argument against patenting genes (although I’m not sure whether it applies very widely). If a gene would have soon been discovered and been made publicly available by a NIH-, DOE-, or NSF-funded project, there is very little public benefit from a private company’s discovering the gene marginally earlier. Yet the cost associated with giving that company property of the gene, and therefore a monopoly over medical applications related to that gene, is huge. Whether it’s generally the case that the genes private companies discover would soon be discovered by public efforts, I don’t know. But when that is the case, I think it’s pretty clear that the cost-benefit calculation does not support ownership of genes. This is the sort of argument we need to see more of.

In the case of software innovation, being “anti-imaginary property” is even less effective, for it’s obvious that important innovations have come from the pursuit of profits. You can criticize Microsoft’s current practices all you want (and you might be right to do so), but the company was instrumental in bringing personal computing to the masses. To make progress, OSS fans should focus on how open source software is in the public interest, and they might push for government sponsorship of OSS efforts, for open source software is possibly the purest example of a public good with positive externalities that the world has ever seen.

I have decided that the goal of this blog (at least for the time being) is promoting more intelligent procrastination. In that spirit, I will share links that help me procrastinate more effectively.

Edge releases an annual “World Question” along with answers from myriad distinguished intellectuals. My favorite response to this year’s question, “What have you changed your mind about?,” is from Charles Sheife, who argues that there is a conflict between science and democratic ideals.

Does tolerance impede the intellectual progress of society? Would this undermine the Millian defense of a “free market of ideas”?

A recent post on Apple Matters argued that the recent resurgence of Apple is bad news for Linux:

In the last two years, OS X has seen continual growth, from 4.21% in Jan 2006 (the first month of figures), to 5.67% in December 2006, to 7.31% in December 2007.

In the same time, Linux’s percentage has risen from only 0.29% to 0.63%. Although depending on how you apply the maths—you can put a positive slant on that by saying it’s more than doubled—the cold truth is Linux on the desktop is still barely worth mentioning. To paraphrase: reports of [Linux's] life have been greatly exaggerated.

I strongly disagree, so I’ll try to explain why this is a very exciting time for Linux.

If NetApplications’s numbers are right, Linux has grown 117% in two years. That’s pretty good, and considerably better than Apple’s 74%. In fact, at this rate it will take less than 13 years to have 100% of the market share! (at which point Apple will have 270%… weird).

Silly extrapolations aside, I don’t think a growth rate of almost 50% per year needs a “positive slant” to be impressive, but what really bothers me is the perception that there is some sort of conflict between Apple and Linux, and that Apple’s victories in this conflict are somehow bad for Linux. Maybe that’s not what Howard is saying, but he certainly suggests that these recent numbers reflect poorly on Linux. That suggestion is very false.

Although Linux’s market share remains small, network effects make these recent statistics very exciting. Wikipedia defines a “network effect” as “a characteristic that causes a good or service to have a value to a potential customer which depends on the number of other customers who own the good or are users of the service.” Linux has many such characteristics, the most obvious being that it is open source software, which means any developers that use Linux can fix bugs they find, which improves the product for everybody else. This improved quality attracts more users, and a positive feedback loop results just like the one that fueled Wikipedia’s rapid growth.

Open source is Linux’s long-term advantage against Mac and Windows, but there are also very powerful network effects associated with any operating system, and these may be more relevant in the short term. If everybody at your office or school is using a particular operating system, it makes a lot of sense for you to use it, too; the more people use an operating system, the more value that operating system has to a given user (holding other things fixed).

You’ve probably heard about how Microsoft in its early days, realized the power of network effects and actually paid computer manufactures to install windows on the computers they sold. By acquiring a large portion of the market, Microsoft added a lot of value to Windows, which led more people to buy Windows, which made added more value to it, which eventually meant Microsoft could charge a high price for Windows even when viable alternatives (like Linux) are free to download.

In any case, Linux has become a little bit more valuable thanks to that extra .34% market share. You might say “sure, but an extra .34% of the market can’t be that much.” I disagree. When an OS has a very small share of the market, each additional .1% adds a lot more value than when an OS has a large market share like Windows. Imagine an extra 1% of the population started using Windows, raising its market share from ninety-something to ninety-something-plus-one percent. Most Windows users probably wouldn’t know the difference. If I’m a college student, almost everybody living in my hall will be using Windows either way. But a 1% increase in market share is huge for an OS with a small market share. An increase from .5% to 1.5% might mean that there will be enough students on any college campus to have a healthy Linux-users’ mailing list and perhaps a Linux-users’ Wiki, making it much easier for students and effectively use Linux on campus. And if an extra 1% of the population switches to Linux, that translates to thousands more people every day reporting problems and finding solutions on the Ubuntu forums and other support milieus.

This means, as Windows loses momentum, Linux may be picking up speed. Furthermore, as users switch from Windows to Apple, Windows loses some value from network effects, and Linux looks relatively more attractive. So Linux and Apple are friends. For now, at least.

Apple has done a great job in recent years, and Microsoft’s blunders have bolstered its success. Probably most people that have ditched Microsoft because of Vista have wisely switched to Apple. But this is good news for Linux, too.