An Alternative to the American Way of Innovation [video]
It's great to see someone advocating for alternative points of view with respect to IP.It's a moot point though. Artisanal hardware is an intellectual dead end. Cost and IP and economics and whatever are a bunch of red herrings.Hardware standardization is pretty much always superior to fragmentation. I've never heard a hardware engineer advocate for fragmentation! Bunnie Huang should be advocating for the artisanal manufacture of software.Then again, it really begs the question, why don't we use any software that comes out of east Asia? Or let's say you buy into sales and profit and economics and mom-and-pop artisanal crafts and whatever as being in and of themselves valuable. It's not happening in Shenzhen with respect to software.The answer is not as simple as localization. Bunnie is having a particularly reductive IP conversation, where there's no law and it's just whatever unwritten cultural norms you personally favor rule the land and can be enforced violently. The IP conversation must be bigger than that, because we live in a world where all the major tech companies, not just Chinese ones, are copying each other's features. And yet, nobody's calling that a lawless Shenzhen world. It's not really about copying or original inventions or any of what he's talking about!So lemme ask you this: would you rather subscribe to an IP policy in the service of an idiosyncratic electronics hardware community? Or would you rather subscribe to whatever IP theory lets you write good software?I'd choose the later. That theory is "Whatever the license says," and the diversity of licenses and their social impact speaks for themselves. For that to work, you have to respect the rule of law. Which isn't saying much!More importantly, lawyers are innovative too. That legal work around OSS licenses has had a much bigger, much more positive impact on the quality of software than a fuck-the-IP-law attitude going on in Shenzhen.