An Alternative to the American Way of Innovation [video]
1–10 of 41 posts
Re: An Alternative to the American Way of Innovation [video]
#2It'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.
Re: An Alternative to the American Way of Innovation [video]
#3It'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…
> Why don't we use any software that comes out of east Asia?
I do, and you should too. For example, I evaluated mobile-focused neural net inference software and ncnn from Tencent came on top: https://github.com/Tencent/ncnn
Re: An Alternative to the American Way of Innovation [video]
#4It'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…
TrendMicro which is Taiwanese/Japanese -well known and used.
Re: An Alternative to the American Way of Innovation [video]
#5It'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…
> why don't we use any software that comes out of east Asia?
I hear Ruby is pretty popular.
Re: An Alternative to the American Way of Innovation [video]
#6[dead]
Re: An Alternative to the American Way of Innovation [video]
#7It'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…
> 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.
Because the approach that Shenzhen uses for hardware is rarely the same approach that they use with software, and their software approach is generally not something to be emulated.
We may get a lot of wacky gizmos out of China, but the vast majority of them run unmodified or craptastically modified Android/Linux/vendor BSP.
The software model that's closest to what Bunnie describes in Shenzhen is the plain old open-source model. To get good quality software, you need to put significant time and resources into these open-source projects, and let people modify or fork them as they see fit.
Really, the goals are just different. The goal of the Shenzhen model is diversity - "there are so many products out there, what should I make that's a little bit different?" The goal of most software is arguably quality and reliability. There's no shortage of software with silly features, and it's usually easy to add a silly feature to an open-source project if you really want something specific. This is often the kind of software modification I associate with the Shenzhen model.
What's difficult is forking a project over an architectural disagreement and then fixing it, because you have to understand a lot more about how the software works before you can do that, and whatever documentation exists is likely to be in English.
Re: An Alternative to the American Way of Innovation [video]
#8This model is definitely better at serving niche markets.
For example there are phone manufacturers in China that don't follow the silly trend of making phones slimmer, more fragile and with smaller batteries. Another example are mini notebooks like the GPD Pocket and its many clones which you can (could? haven't looked in a while) only get from china.
I'm a happy user of both product categories and don't think any western company could have been convinced to build these. The market is just too small.
Since I find myself in these small markets quite often (I love robust/rugged devices, phones with hardware keyboards, open hardware, ...) that's a super useful development for me. And I think there are more people like me, maybe with different wishes, but in similarly small markets, that would profit from more product diversity and easier customization of products.
Re: An Alternative to the American Way of Innovation [video]
#9It'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…
> 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. Because the approach that Shenzhen uses for hardware is rarely the same approach that they use with software, and thei…
> The software model that's closest to what Bunnie describes in Shenzhen is the plain old open-source model
My point is, that model only exists if you respect the rule of law and specifically conventional copyright. So the thing we can point to as a successful (in some conventional sense, as opposed to idiosyncratically "pro-artisanal" Bunnie Huang sense) demo of his theory exists because of, not in spite of Western IP law!
Re: An Alternative to the American Way of Innovation [video]
#10It'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…
> why don't we use any software that comes out of east Asia?
Ruby Language is driven by Matz from Japan. I'm sure there are other projects from East Asia as well that I can't name at the moment.
If you're using a Nintendo Switch or a Playstation, those are also developed by Japanese companies in East ASia.
If you want to look at smartphone apps developed in East Asia, there are many that are very influential such as Line in Japan, Kakao in Korea, WeChat and Alipay in China, etc. Granted these smartphone apps use either Java or Objective-C but they are 'made in East Asia."
In fact, for the China smartphone market, because China blocks most non-Chinese Internet services via the Great Firewall (i.e. Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) the vast majority of Chinese apps are made in China. If you don't live in China or Japan or Korea, you probably don't use the apps that are made for those markets.