On NN workshop RE: Re: [governance] Three IGC workshops ) NN FYI DIPLO

[Lee W McKnight]

Hi Guru,

A little slow responding, but I did want to comment, as someone who has been working with students and others modeling alternatives such as - strictly open source vs - open standards/open interfaces vs proprietary protocols/standards. And of course I am speaking generally, and perhaps others should re-run analyses in other nations to draw their own conclusions:

Open source software often requires higher labor/maintenance cost since the technical personnel maintaining the system are more skilled and hence must be more highly paid - not that that is a bad thing.

Whereas closed/packaged software/proprietary systems are more idiot-proof  - that's part of what you pay for - so support/technical personnel are not as expensive hence lower recurring labor costs are incurred. Which is a good or bad thing depending upon one's point of view.

And the intermediary open standard/open interface ground is - somewhere in between and probably requires case by case analysis of trade-offs and specific licensing terms/fine print. Allowing widespread use and open innovation, hopefully, while - again hopefully - leading to a reaonable and non-discriminatrory split of revenues, if new products are coimemrcialized on top of the 'open standard/interface.'

In education sector, that would possibly translate to students and teachers being free to do whatever they wanted; but if they then tried to - sell to schools their new creations - then yeah someone might ask for a - fair and reasonable, ok possibly unreasonable - cut of the fee. Hypothetically speaking. 

Perhaps/probably in India the relative cost equation is different than US given prevailing local wages and availability of skilled in the art personnel, and cost of package software relative to labor and other costs, and it is more open and shut in favor of open source at all times; but in US there are practical reasons a lot of small businesses who can;t afford skilled techies on staff.....stick with those big multinational offering to make life easier for a small biz...or a government agency's front line personnel. Including school teachers.

Lee
________________________________________
From: governance at lists.cpsr.org [governance at lists.cpsr.org] On Behalf Of Guru गुरु [Guru at ITforChange.net]
Sent: Saturday, April 16, 2011 8:08 AM
To: governance at lists.cpsr.org; Norbert Bollow
Subject: Re: On NN workshop RE: Re: [governance] Three IGC workshops ) NN FYI DIPLO

On 16/04/11 14:24, Norbert Bollow wrote:

parminder <parminder at itforchange.net><mailto:parminder at itforchange.net> wrote:


On Friday 15 April 2011 08:55 PM, McTim wrote:



NB: this is the same point made by PJS, just comes at it from a
different perspective.

Sure I can do that.  How shall I/we define what we mean by  NN??

I think we are all for NN, just some of us have different definitions.



I dont think it is so. I completely agree with the definition that FCC
uses for NN (available at the link
http://www.cybertelecom.org/ci/neutralnprm.htm forwarded earlier by
Adam). And I have seen all serious advocates of NN  agree to such a
definition. This thing about different definitions is mostly a red herring.



There's a similar phenomenon in the context of the conflicts around
"open standards". Those companies who benefit from having a dominant
market position together with customer lock-in via proprietary
communication protocols and/or data formats typically don't argue
against "open standards", but rather they agree superficially while
getting involved at verious levels in the processes that shape
actual practical policy with the goal of making sure that when
actually implemented, the "open standards" policy doesn't achieve
the objectives that were intended by its initial proponents.

Greetings,
Norbert


Interestingly, this is actually happening in India - in the 'ICTs in education national policy' that the Federal govt is framing. The second draft of this policy had a section requiring 'free and open source software to be preferred' by schools/school systems. The third version added a clause that 'open standards to be used' (India has recently adopted a 'policy on open standards in e-governance' and provisionally notified ODF as the default document standard) and dropped the free and open source requirement ... Large (near) monopoly transnationals have huge muscle power to create sufficient confusion/grey to obsfuscate policy goals .... In our case, we have been able to network with eminent educationists to write clearly on this issue (http://www.itforchange.net/edu-policy) to the government yesterday and try and resist policy obfuscation..

regards,
Guru

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