taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

It’s interesting reading US weblogs when they wax enthusiastic about Ryanair, typically on the foot of this BusinessWeek article.

Here’s the thing — flying Ryanair is a deeply unpleasant experience. I’ve heard rumour that their staff are paid commission based on how many discretionary charges they can pile onto the basic fare — leaving you feeling nickled and dimed at every turn — and that certainly matches with my experience. I mean, I’ve had better service in train stations in Uttar Pradesh.

In our case, our “no more” moment was after a trip to Spain earlier this year, where we were humiliated for attempting to shift around luggage instead of immediately paying the charges liable once you exceed 15 kilos (33 pounds). (Naturally, there’s no weighing scales until you get right in front of the check-in desk…) Once it became clear we didn’t want to pay the fee, the check-in person screamed at us, and sent us to the back of the check-in queue – like bold schoolchildren!

This level of service is pretty standard, going by local word of mouth. Several of my friends have, like me, vowed never to fly them again, even picking more expensive flights to more distant airports to avoid it.

It’s certainly not comparable to JetBlue, or any other low-fare airline I’ve had the pleasure of dealing with — this is a level below. The BusinessWeek article ends with:

American long-haul discounters aren’t likely to go to the extremes Ryanair has gone to sell basic services, but they’re paying more attention to Ryanair these days. “They’re on the cutting edge,” says Tad Hutcheson, vice-president for marketing at AirTran, which recently assigned two marketing staffers to spend a week flying on Ryanair. “Charging for Cokes or snacks, blankets or pillows–I’m not sure Americans are ready for that.”

Well, I certainly hope not, for their sakes!

Tags: business, cluetrain, ryanair, service, travel

A commenter at this post on Colm MacCarthaigh’s weblog writes:

I guess I still don’t understand how Open Source makes sense for the developers, economically. I understand how it makes sense for adapters like me, who take an app like Xoops or Gecko and customize it gently for a contract. Saves me hundreds of hours of labour. The down side of this is that the whole software industry is seeing a good deal of undercutting aimed at sales to small and medium sized commercial institutions.

Similarly, in the follow-up to the O’Reilly “web 2.0″ trademark shitstorm, there’s been quite a few comments along the lines of “it’s all hype anyway”.

I disagree with that assertion — and Joe Drumgoole has posted a great list of key Web 2.0 vs Web 1.0 differentiators, which nails down some key ideas about the new concepts, in a clear set of one-liners.

Both open source software companies, and “web 2.0″ companies, are based on new economic ideas about software and the internet. There’s still quite a lot of confusion, fear and doubt about both, I think.

Open Source

As I said in my comment at Colm’s weblog — open source is a network effect. If you think of the software market as a single buyer and seller, with the seller producing software and selling to the buyer, it doesn’t make sense.

But that’s not the real picture of a software market. If you expand the picture beyond that, to a more realistic picture of a larger community of all sorts of people at all levels, with various levels interacting in a more complex maze of conversation and transactions, open source creates new opportunities.

Here’s one example, speaking from experience. As the developer of SpamAssassin, open source made sense for me because I could never compete with the big companies any other way.

If I had been considering it in terms of me (the seller) and a single customer (the buyer), economically I could make a case of ‘proprietary SpamAssassin’ being a viable situation — but that’s not the real situation; in reality there was me, the buyer, a few 800lb gorillas who could stomp all over any puny little underfunded Irish company I could put together, and quite a few other very smart people, who I could never afford to employ, who were happy to help out on ‘open-source SpamAssassin’ for free.

Given this picture, I’m quite sure that I made the right choice by open sourcing my code. Since then, I’ve basically had a career in SpamAssassin. In other words my open source product allowed me to make income that I wouldn’t have had, any other way.

It’s certainly not simple economics, is a risk, and is complicated, and many people don’t believe it works — but it’s viable as an economic strategy for developers, in my experience. (I’m not sure how to make it work for an entire company, mind you, but for single developers it’s entirely viable.)

Web 2.0

Similarly — I feel some of the companies that have been tagged as “web 2.0″ are using the core ideas of open source code, and applying them in other ways.

Consider Threadless, which encourages designers to make their designs available, essentially for free — the designer doesn’t get paid when their tee shirt is printed; they get entered into a contest to win prizes.

Or Upcoming.org, where event tracking is entirely user-contributed; there’s no professional content writers scribbling reviews and leader text, just random people doing the same. For fun, wtf!

Or Flickr, where users upload their photos for free to create the social experience that is the site’s unique selling point.

In other words — these companies rely heavily on communities (or more correctly certain actors within the community) to produce part of the system – exactly as open source development relies on bottom-up community contribution to help out a little in places.

The alternative is the traditional, “web 1.0″ style; it’s where you’re Bill Gates in the late 90’s, running a commercial software company from the top down.

• You have the “crown jewels” — your source code — and the “users” don’t get to see it; they just “use”.
• Then they get to pay for upgrades to the next version.
• If you deal with users, it’s via your sales “channels” and your tech support call centre.
• User forums are certainly not to be encouraged, since it could be a PR nightmare if your users start getting together and talking about how buggy your products are.
• Developers (er, I mean “engineers”) similarly can’t go talking to customers on those forums, since they’ll get distracted and give away competitive advantage by accidentally leaking secrets.
• Anyway, the best PR is the stuff that your PR staff put out — if customers talk to engineers they’ll just get confused by the over-technical messages!

Yeah, so, good luck with that. I remember doing all that back in the ’90’s and it really wasn’t much fun being so bloody paranoid all the time ;)

URLs:

• Joe Drumgoole’s list
• Jeffrey Kalmikoff of Threadless’ skinnyCorp on the subject

(PS: The web2.0 companies aren’t using all of the concepts of open-source, of course — not all those web apps have their source code available for public reimplementation and cloning. I wish they were, but as I said, I can’t see how that’s entirely viable for every company. Not that it seems to stop the cloners, anyway. ;)

Tags: business, coding, community, economics, network-effects, open-source, software, web2.0

Patents: yes, I keep rattling on about this — the vote is coming up on July 6th. I promise I’ll shut up after that ;)

UEAPME has issued a statement regarding the directive which is strongly critical of its current wording (UEAPME is the European small and medium-sized business trade association, comprising 11 million SMEs). Quote:

‘The failure to clearly remove software from the scope of the directive is a setback for small businesses throughout Europe. UEAPME is now calling on the European Parliament to reverse yesterday’s decision at plenary session next month and send a strong message that an EU software patent is not an option,’ Hans-Werner Müller, UEAPME Secretary General, stated.

‘There is growing agreement among all actors that software should not be patented, so providing an unequivocal definition in the directive that guarantees this is clearly in the general interest. We are calling on the Parliament to support the amendments that would ensure this,’ said Mr Müller.

‘The cacophony of misinformation and misleading spin from the large industry lobby in the run up to this vote has obscured the general consensus on preventing the patenting of pure software.’

That’s all well and good. So presumably the Irish members of UEAPME, ISME and the SFA, are agreeing, right? Sadly, neither of these have issued any press releases on the subject, as far as I can see, and approaches by members of IFSO have been totally fruitless.

Since both have made recent press noting that Irish small businesses face difficulties with the rising costs of doing business, this would seem to be a no-brainer — legalising software patents would immediately open Irish SMEs up to the costs associated with them: licensing fees, fighting spurious infringement litigation from ‘patent troll’ companies, the ‘chilling effects’ on investors noted by Laura Creighton, and of course the high price of retaining patent lawyers to file patents on your own innovations. One wonders why they aren’t concerned about these costs…

Tags: business, directive, july, parliament, patent, patents, press, smes, software, ueapme, vote

Mr. Justice Bradley, discussing US patent law in 1882:

The design of the patent laws is to reward those who make some substantial discovery or invention, which adds to our knowledge and makes a step in advance in the useful arts. Such inventors are worthy of all favor. It was never the object of those laws to grant a monopoly for every trifling device, every shadow of a shade of an idea, which would naturally and spontaneously occur to any skilled mechanic or operator in the ordinary progress of manufactures.

Such an indiscriminate creation of exclusive privileges tends rather to obstruct than to stimulate invention. It creates a class of speculative schemers who make it their business to watch the advancing wave of improvement, and gather its foam in the form of patented monopolies, which enable them to lay a heavy tax upon the industry of the country, without contributing anything to the real advancement of the arts. It embarrasses the honest pursuit of business with fears and apprehensions of concealed liens and unknown liabilities to lawsuits and vexatious accountings for profits made in good faith.

Well said that man! (via)

Tags: advance, business, design, discovery, favor, invention, knowledge, law, patent, step

Spam: The Business Software Alliance, a UK anti-piracy body representing many of the major software vendors, recently issued a spam-related press release which got a lot of attention in the UK press (they have great press contacts!).

To quote John Graham-Cumming’s newsletter on the subject:

1 in 5 British Consumers Buy Software from Spam: that’s according to a survey by the Business Software Alliance. I find that a pretty surprisingly high number and considering it comes from an advocacy group that tries to get people to buy legitimate copies of software I expect it’s not totally accurate. The one thing I find really surprising from the survey are these two statistics: 23% of spam is read by the person receiving it and 22% of people have bought software. Apparently, 11% of people surveyed like the idea of buying through spam because the software is cheaper.

It’s still an interesting figure, but the BSA has come up with some pretty suspect statistics in the past, so pinch of salt applies. As jgc points out, the BSA have a vested interest in making the problem sound worse than it may be in reality.

Still, the survey PDF can be read here, and is worth a look.

Tags: alliance, body, bsa, business, lot, press, release, software, spam, survey

Patents: Newsweek: Factory of the Future?:

The dino’s ferociously bared teeth hint at elements of Intellectual Ventures’ bold business plan. Myhrvold and his partner, former Microsoft chief software architect Edward Jung, have created the quintessential company for the 21st century. It doesn’t actually make anything … Only patent attorneys populate the quiet hallways. …

Sources familiar with Myhrvold’s strategy say that he has raised $350 million from some of the largest companies in high tech: Microsoft, Intel, Sony, Nokia and Apple. Google and eBay also recently invested. With this large bankroll, the company is out buying existing patents in droves. (Myhrvold won’t comment on these activities, but sources say he has already purchased about 1,000 patents.) The strategy is to set up a sort of patent marketplace. Patent owners get money upfront for the dusty ideas sitting on their shelves, the investors get the rights to use the ideas without being sued and Myhrvold gets to rent those same ideas to other companies that need them to continue creating products. …

“We’re concerned that these giant pools of patent rights are going to prevent entrepreneurs from entering markets, as opposed to being used to promote innovation,” says one worried Silicon Valley venture capitalist.

Now that’s scary…

Tags: business, company, factory, future, intellectual, microsoft, myhrvold, newsweek, patent, patents, strategy

Funny: AFP: Cambodians Eager to Dine on Rats:

‘At first I just cooked them for my family to eat, but guests who tried them said they were tasty, so I started selling a few fried rats to the villagers,’ he said. Business boomed so he devoted his menu to them.

‘ We only eat the small rats — we dare not eat the big ones because they have too much hair.’

Big in Laos, too — although I don’t think I’ve heard of sit-down restaurants selling them. When I was travelling in Laos, one of the first tips I heard from other travellers was, ‘if you see something that looks like a fried rat — it is‘. urrgh.

(BTW, there’s actually good reasons not to eat rat-meat; wild rats and mice are truly filthy animals, vectors of all sorts of nasty diseases.)

Tags: afp, big, business, dine, family, funny, hair, menu, rat, rats, something

Web: My Dad runs a couple of websites — his architectural photography business, and Andalucia Photo Gallery, a side project selling some lovely photos from the Andalusia region of Spain.

Needless to say, as the family geek, guess who coded all that up? Using WebMake, naturally ;) This was the main reason I wrote the ‘thumbnail_tag’ plugin.

You’ll note, however, that the image to right is watermarked, quite small, and encoded with a low quality setting. It turned out after a couple of years of operation, that the images were being downloaded and used in print all over the place — from both sites!

It seems photo piracy is rampant. Even with terms of use clearly linked on the sites, it’s still commonplace for print publications to swipe the images — and not just the little guys, either — some big commercial names have apparently used the images without asking (or paying licensing fees).

The Andalucia gallery site was a favourite; being a good hit for ‘travel photos spain’ meant lots of images being used for holiday pages in magazines, newspapers, and so on.

Needless to say, digital watermarking software doesn’t work — it’s trivial to load an image into Photoshop, resize or crop, and resave, apparently. Even if PS did respect the watermarks, netpbm doesn’t, and a watermarked image isn’t identifiable as such once it appears in print anyway! So we went for the blunt-tool approach, adding visible watermarks to the images.

It’s pretty easy — pamcomp allows you to overlay one image on top of another, using a third as an ‘alpha mask’ to control transparency. The results are pretty nice and not too intrusive.

It’s a shame it has to be done, though… :(

Tags: business, couple, dad, gallery, image, photo, photography, print, project, side, web

Tech: I should note this here just in case anyone finds it useful. A handy tip for anyone visiting Caesar’s Palace; their ‘Business Center’ doesn’t have wifi yet, but (cough) one of their neighbours certainly does ;)

Tags: anyone, business, caesar, case, center, cough, palace, tech, tip, wifi

Patents: There’s a good discussion over at Joi Ito’s weblog on software patents.

Unfortunately, there’s a persistent, and popular, fallacy that crops up quite frequently in these discussions, and does so here in the comments:

‘much of the processing of patents has been, to use understatement, deficient. An invention that is ’silly or obvious’ will likely not pass the approrpiate legal test - if this test is applied by people who understand the inventive technology …. while I agree with most of your observations about deficiencies, I fail to see the logic in your solution (to simply outlaw these kinds of inventions).’

So, what the commenter is saying is that the patenting of software and business methods would be acceptable, if only the ‘inventive bar’ was raised so that trivial patents were not granted.

The problem with this is that:

• it ignores the fundamental problem with these kinds of patents, which is

  • that they patent ideas instead of physical inventions.

    A parallel would be to allow the patenting of plot-lines in fiction, meter in poetry, or combinations of ingredients and cooking methods in recipes. These are all ideas, transformed into output ‘products’ by performing them as input on a set of hardware (books, cooking equipment), in the same way as software patents and business method patents are abstract ideas that operate on input, generating output, when implemented on a CPU. So, should they be patentable, too?

    Patenting of physical designs is fundamentally different from patenting of abstract ideas in one key way. Physical designs must function correctly under real-world physics, and this requires extensive up-front design and prototyping, before they can be turned into mass-produced products.

    Abstract ideas can be developed mentally, and the up-front work required before the idea can be put down on paper is trivial by comparison.

    Consider these EPO patents: EP0807891 (Sun’s ’shopping cart’ patent) or EP0689133 (Adobe’s ‘tabbed palette window’ patent). The up-front work required to devise these applications is trivial to anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of UI design; the hard part appears to be writing the legalese, and I understand the patent lawyers take care of that part. ;)

    Compare with US patent D0450164, a design patent for a Dyson washing machine. The level of detail, and extensive specifications, is massive, and it’s clear a lot of work had gone into the process before the patent application was filed.

  • In addition, the commenter assumes that extensive prior art searches really do take place. From what I’ve heard from patent applicants, and from what I’ve observed in the range of granted software patents, this is cursory at best, and generally performed by the patent lawyer and the examiner, not the applicant themselves.

    I’ve even observed a few patents where prior art, cited in the patent, implemented exactly what was claimed!

Tags: business, cooking, discussion, input, output, patent, patents, problem, software, test, way

Open Source: ITConversations: Doug Kaye and Philip Greenspun (via Tony Bowden).

Very interesting interview overall. Philip notes that he didn’t see weblogs coming because ‘it never occurred to me that relatively minor changes in how you allow people to author would cause such a revolution’. I must admit, I was the same. As far as I could see, it was just another HTML page, being updated frequently — it took me quite a while before I realised the social aspects, of conversations taking places in a group of weblogs, was making a whole new thing.

Also, there’s a great few paragraphs where he discusses how sensitive to supply-side economics the whole ‘building a business on open source’ thing is. Search for ‘a dollar cheaper and a day faster’ to find it.

Tags: author, business, group, html, interview, itconversations, open, page, revolution, thing, while

Patents: FFII: Conferences and ‘Patent Riots’ in Brussels 2004-04-14
: ‘The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) calls on its 50.000 European supporters and on 300.000 petition signatories, including more than 2000 CEOs of European software companies, to take to the streets in Brussels on April 14 and in national capitals around 1st of May, and to temporarily block access to their websites, in protest against new moves by the EU Council and Commission to legalise patents on computerised calculation rules and business methods’.

Last year, the European Parliament voted to exclude software and business methods from patentability. Now, it appears the EU Council is secretly planning to push that through regardless — so FFII are planning another round of protest for 2004-04-14.

In other news — the European Patent Office and other pro-patent bodies have always insisted that the WTO Trade-Related Intellectual Property (TRIPS) treaty required that software be patentable. However, this poster thinks not:

Article 10 of said treaty clearly states: a.. ‘Computer programs, whether in source or object code, shall be protected as literary works under the Berne Convention (1971).’

This is the strange thing you see, the statement doesn’t seem to mean that much on first glance. It is only when reading it closely that one realises that it does not simply say that ‘computer programs are automatically copyrighted under the Berne Convention’, it specifies they ’shall be protected as literary works’.

Literary works cannot be patented because they are not inventions. Indeed if literary works could be patented one would have to concede that books, screenplays, and music could be patented as well although according to my research there is no provision for this in law. We would also have to apply patent laws to these areas since we are not allowed, apparently under article 5 to restrict on the basis of the field of technology.

On reflection, it’s actually a very interesting comparison. Like literary works, it’s not the idea of what software does (the plot summary) that makes it valuable, it’s all the fiddly details of its implementation (the full story). Hmm! Maybe TRIPS got that right after all…

Tags: article, business, computer, council, european, ffii, patent, patents, protest, software, treaty

Spam: WSJ: For Orlando Soto, No Day Is Complete Without Some Spam.

Mr. Soto routinely comes home to some 150 e-mail pitches, and he loves getting them all … he buys stuff pitched in spam e-mail — again and again. He buys spam-pitched aromatherapy oils for his wife and pharmaceuticals for himself. … He buys stuff via spam for himself and to resell on Web sites he sets up — a business idea he got from a spam pitch. …

It’s mind-blowing — leaves you wondering how one man could be so gullible, and hand over so much money to some of the world’s dodgiest vendors, without even any concept of comparison shopping (and without falling victim to identity theft and a cleared-out bank account). Until you get to this line:

In the past, Mr. Soto says he has sent out spam himself,

Aha.

but he doesn’t any more for fear of the increasing multitude of federal and state spam regulations now on the books.

Of course. (link via Craig)

Tags: aromatherapy, business, day, home, orlando, spam, stuff, web, wife, wsj

EU: EU Reporter (PDF) thoroughly trashes the new law:

The legislation as structured is opposed by lawyers and judges, who have said that large corporations will be able to slap pre-emptive injunctions on small manufacturers and put them out of business without any fear of having to pay compensation if their action proves to be no more than to gain commercial advantage.

Music companies will get the right to demand raids merely on suspicion of a breach including on private homes.

WITHOUT PROOF factories could be closed, assets and bank accounts frozen by opportunist actions based on patents claims, Greg Perry, Director General of the Brussels-based European Generic Medicines Association told EU Reporter. …

Pressure from the current 15 Member States is being blamed by a large swathe of industry for rushing bad legislation into law. Surprisingly, one of Britain’s largest corporations has slammed both parliament and Council saying: ‘It will take many years to undo the damage that this legislation has the potential to do.’ Unsurprisingly the corporation, normally close to the British Government, refused to be named.

Tags: action, advantage, business, compensation, eu, fear, law, legislation, music, pdf, reporter

Politics: G2: Tales of Tel Aviv.

Tomer, aged 33, a promoter in the music business who personifies Israel’s lost generation, the soldiers of the two intifadas: ‘There’s no prize any more for being a good soldier or a good citizen, we all have a mental scratch - for some of us it’s a scar, for others it’s a Grand Canyon. The saddest thing for me is seeing people in their mid-20s with such an empty look in their eyes. All the symptoms are of people losing hope, of seeing no solution.

At the moment I’m trying to promote the Geneva accords as much as possible. We’ve all made so many mistakes in this region, what else have we got to lose? But mainly, I’m just sad.’

Tags: business, citizen, generation, music, politics, prize, promoter, scar, scratch, soldier, tomer

Good Wired article on the subject:

A security flaw at a website operated by the purveyors of penis-enlargement pills has provided the world with a depressing answer to the question: Who in their right mind would buy something from a spammer? An order log left exposed at one of Amazing Internet Products’ websites revealed that, over a four-week period, some 6,000 people responded to e-mail ads and placed orders for the company’s Pinacle herbal supplement. Most customers ordered two bottles of the pills at a price of $50 per bottle.

And check this out for bizarre:

An investigation … last month revealed that Bournival’s mentor and business partner is Davis Wolfgang Hawke, a chess expert and former neo-Nazi leader who turned to the spam business in 1999 after it became public that his father was Jewish.

Tags: answer, article, business, flaw, good, question, security, website, wired, world

So NetFlix have patented their business method; that is, subscribing to video/DVD rentals — where instead of being charged per disc, you are charged a monthly fee and can keep the rentals indefinitely without late fees. Patent here. Now, NetFlix is a very cool service, I’ve really been enjoying it. But this patent is a bit nasty.

Think about it: what’s difficult about the NetFlix setup? Is it thinking up the concept for how the business works, as described in the patent?

Or is it executing the details, setting up efficient shipping infrastructure, tracking, billing, stock management etc., efficiently enough to make a profit?

Bad news for these companies, who are now infringing:

• GameFly, which is the NetFlix model applied to games.
• GreenCine, a more indie- and anime-oriented DVD site.

As one commenter on the /. story noted, ‘imagine if McDonalds had patented the drive-thru’.

Tags: business, cool, disc, dvd, fee, method, netflix, patent, service, video

VNUNet: You have mail: 31 billion a day, set to rise to 60 billion by 2006 (according to IDC). “Only a more effective means of filtering out spam would ‘ensure that email continues to be a valuable business and personal communications tool,’ he said.”

Tags: business, day, email, idc, mail, spam, tool, vnunet