Date: 2003/03/22 17:25
From: Carl Vilbrandt <carl@ggpl.org>
To: discuss@ggpl.org
Impact of the patent trend / on the other side so to speak .
The trend you speak of is also going the wrong way not only for
educational enities, but also for large corporations who out of the need
to be globaly competive must become educational institutions and spend
large sums of finical resources on the education of their workers
because of the rate of change of accelerating evloutionary returns of
digital technologies. Large corporations also lead universities in
R&D. The R&D capabilites of all but a few universities in the states
fall far below the capabilties of large corporations. Large
corporations actually have replace or replicate the fuctions of
univerisites. They have created the problem by haveing interlocking
patent agreements that has lock out universities so they don't have a
source of human resources aviable to them. Answer try to take over the
facilities, faculity and students of universities and force them to work
under there IP to be able to get an education.
In the US I had large companies both US and Japanese threating not to
hire any students coming from our comunity collage if we don't train
them specifically to work on their machines. They offered each one
million if we did. However the public pays 20 million a year. Most of
the teachers were looking at the money and suggested we take it and do
what we want anyway..... It was sad. The conflict between the needs of
education and training people in skills that means they can only find
work in a very large company. BTW is was HP and Sony..... My position
against this move cost me work at the collage. Now I am faced with the
same here.
I just had two of my graduate student taken from my by Dr Wei who has
recive grants of a million dollars a year for five years and could offer
them scholarships and living stypends. However the best programer whos
skills are not well knowen refused to go with Dr. Wei. Dr. Wei is in
fact a very poor manager and does not have the capability to compete in
the medical field against very large companies or he would be working
for them. However the current results are very chilling the lab has been
change into over 50 very small cubes with high walls. Not for students,
but for programers, not for researchers but project managers.....
I believe the current trend of merging business, governmental and
educational organizations functions will continue at a faster rate as
the accelerating returns of digital evolution continues and businesses
are transform into digital based service structures that must have
rationale other than profit for services to survive. Governmental
educational and business entities to survive global competition must
incorporate both global openness, transparent transactions (the eyes of
the many) and accountability, because of the freedom of information
stemming for the new digital based informational structures internet
require this. The proposed Organis digital based business structures
and Greater Good Public Licenses agreement incorporate all three of
these requirements and is one of the solutions for competing in the
global market place.
Japan is following the US because it feels it has little
choice...because of the WTO and being locked out of high technology.....
however at the same time they have showen support for free source
projects. If we can create a good understand able free choice plan and
show present them with a free choice it could make a difference.