Grants promoting unfettered innovation

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Grants promoting unfettered innovation
By Dan Gillmor
Mercury News Technology Columnist

Last Monday, the Open Source Applications Foundation reached an important
milestone. It posted some software code on the Internet and invited
programmers around the world to offer suggestions and improvements.

The posting was an early -- very early -- version of ``Chandler,'' the code
name for an open-source personal information manager, e-mail and calendar
program. The project and the foundation (www.osafoundation.org) are the
brainchild of Mitch Kapor, a key figure in the personal-computer industry,
and a talented group of other people who want to create a new, unfettered
platform for innovation.

They hit another, less-noticed milestone at the end of March, when the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (www.mellon.org) awarded the project a $98,000
grant. The money is being used to see if Chandler -- currently aimed at
individuals and smaller businesses -- can work on a much larger scale,
serving the needs of huge universities.

The Mellon grant was, I hope, a harbinger of something much bigger. As we
move into a Digital Age, it's essential that the foundation community
recognize a crucial need: to keep tomorrow's information architecture as
open, as free for all to use, as possible.

This is not an attack on free markets, which work brilliantly most of the
time. But markets have failed to serve some genuine needs, such as treating
diseases of the poor and dispossessed.

The corporate medical establishment's commercial indifference to disease
prevention and treatment in developing nations has sparked enormously
important work, for example, from organizations such as the Bill & Melinda
Gates Foundation.

In technology and the area known as ``intellectual property,'' the
marketplace has failed repeatedly, largely because of the unwillingness of
the political system to ensure fair competition. The emergence of abusive
monopolies is just one symptom.

I don't expect the Gates Foundation (www.gatesfoundation.org) to do much
about market failures in technology, some of which Microsoft Chairman Bill
Gates has chiefly engineered.

But other philanthropists can, and should, do something to ensure openness
in technology.

The Mellon Foundation grant to the Chandler Project isn't the first such
move, actually, just the most recent.

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (www.macfound.org), best
known for the ``genius grants'' it makes to innovative individuals, last
year launched an initiative to fund projects ``that contribute to a balance
between the needs of creators and the public in intellectual-property laws,
regulations and practices.''

A few specific areas in the intellectual-property arena that are worthy of
social investment by foundations:

* Hollywood and the music industry have controlled both the debate and the
law surrounding the rights of copyright holders versus the rights of the
public. Educating people about what they're losing in this war -- including
the commons of knowledge on which new innovation depends -- is essential.

Last year, the MacArthur Foundation awarded $1.2 million over three years to
Creative Commons (www.creativecommons.org), a project affiliated with
Stanford University designed to beef up the public domain by helping authors
who want to reserve some, but not all, rights they would ordinarily have
under current copyright law. (Full disclosure: My upcoming book will use a
Creative Commons license to have a shorter copyright term than the law
allows.)

* Another disaster in the intellectual-property arena is the patent system,
which has all but imploded on itself. The U.S. Patent & Trademark Office
(PTO) is infamous for its willingness to issue absurd patents. This is
creating a major drag on innovation as companies fight off unfair claims and
spend uncreative time and money getting their own, defensive patents.

Some foundation should fund what amounts to a legal swat team that
challenges bad patents. (There is risk in this approach: It might reward bad
behavior at a policy level. Even if the PTO wanted to reform, Congress
doesn't let the PTO use all the money that comes in from patent applications
to hire better examiners, thereby helping to perpetuate a broken system.)

* Several excellent grass-roots organizations have emerged in recent years
to promote privacy. Some companies sell products that help Internet users
find and eradicate spy-ware, the software that watches what users do and
sends messages elsewhere. Savvy computer users can encrypt, or scramble,
their communications.

But encryption still is not easy to use in basic communications such as
e-mail, at least for the average person, and the marketplace hasn't
responded. Some organization should seed the development of a robust privacy
toolkit that includes easy-to-use encryption.

Fixing high-level problems wasn't the motive of the people at Mellon
Foundation -- an organization built from money made by one of the ``robber
barons'' of an earlier time -- when it gave the Chandler Project some money.
The goal was to address a smaller, but serious, problem in the education
field, namely handling electronic calendars. Commercial software can do some
of the job, but universities have needs commercial vendors aren't
satisfying.

Many foundations have put resources into technology projects aimed at
promoting education and research. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
in Menlo Park recently joined with Mellon, for example, to support the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in its move to put online the
materials for every single course taught at the university.

Ira Fuchs, vice president for research in information technology at Mellon,
is enthusiastic about open-source software, a genre that specifically
permits users to see and modify the underlying code at no cost.

But he's more interested in promoting open standards for use in the
educational community, because open standards lead to innovation. When
Mellon funds something in this area, he says, it must be made ``freely
available for academic use, instruction and research.''

This kind of attitude is valuable, because the liberal sharing of
information -- not hoarding for proprietary gain -- has been a bedrock of
progress over the centuries. If more foundations will recognize that fact,
and act on it in a wider way than they have in the past, they'll be doing a
great service for future generations. A lot is at stake, and they have the
resources to make a difference.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dan Gillmor's column appears each Sunday, Wednesday and Saturday. Visit
Dan's online column, eJournal at
http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/columns/dangillmor/. E-mail Dan at
dgillmor () sjmercury com 

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