Finding a Fair Price for Free Knowledge

Peter Eckersley has written about "Intellectual property in the Digital Age" in New Scientist on 24th June 2009. To quote:-

TEN years ago, a piece of software called Napster taught us that scarcity is no longer a law of nature. The physics of our universe would allow everyone with access to a networked computer to enjoy, for free, every song, every film, every book, every piece of research, every computer program, every last thing that could be made out of digital ones and zeros. The question became not, will nature allow it, but will our legal and economic system ever allow it?

This is a question about the future of capitalism, the economic system that arose from scarcity. Ours is the era of expanded copyright systems and enormous portfolios of dubious patents, of trade secrecy, the privatisation of the fruits of publicly funded research, and other phenomena that we collectively term "intellectual property". As technology has made a new abundance of knowledge possible, politicians, lawyers, corporations and university administrations have become more and more determined to preserve its scarcity.

So will we cling to scarcity just so that we can keep capitalism?

Or will capitalism have to evolve into some new kind of digital economics?

The roots of agile project management

Rick Freedman has written about Agile Project Management in Techrepublic on 24th June 2009. To quote:-

Here’s a brief history of agile project management. By brushing up on these fundamental concepts, you’ll gain insight into the challenges and problems that agile techniques are designed to resolve.

In 1998, Harvard Business School academics Robert D. Austin and Richard L. Nolan studied large software projects. Their study, which questioned many of the fundamental ideas of IT development and project management, produced these key findings:

• The first flawed assumption is that it is possible to plan such a large project.


• The second flawed assumption is that it is possible to protect against late changes.


• The third flawed assumption is that it even makes sense to lock in big projects early.

Watts Humphrey, a respected IBM researcher, followed this study with a paper outlining his Requirements Uncertainty Principle, which asserts that:
"For a new software system, the requirements will not be completely known until after the users have used it."

Hadar Ziv of the University of California followed soon afterwards with his Uncertainty Principle in Software Engineering, which states:

"Uncertainty is inherent and inevitable in software development processes and products."