Presentations, Conferences and Meetings

On Thursday I gave my paper at AUUG on the Econmics of Open Source; I only have a handful of slides, with further notes forthcoming, but even that should be enough to illustrate the main point - that software patents and copyright are a form of monopoly that are ultimately anti-competitive, despite driving research and development in the first instance. My conclusion (with an explicit "this must be developed further") recommended public and financial incentives that do not rely on patents and copyrights.

In addition to giving the paper I also found myself chairing a session with an excellent paper on the new Falcon storage engine for MySQL by none other than arjen_lentz, Nikolai Lusan's paper on LDAP and the "one password per user" objective (users are dangerous to themselves, imo), and Rob Pike's illustrative "Fault Tolerance At Google" (go on, guess what google's infrastructure runs on). Other presentations I attended included "Open Documentation Framework" by Michael Strong, Jonathan Oxer's "Software Freedom: Pragmatic Idealism?" (which, with a bit of work could become a showcase paper on why educators should teach Linux) and Paul McGowan's paper on vehicular recording devices for car insurance etc (which I have started to promote to certain other individuals as a viable business proposition). On the Friday, after attending their AGM, I decided to join AUUG.

On Saturday I attended the biennial Pax Christi conference. I was expecting a bunch of Christian hippies; they were - except they were hippies from the sixties. I swear I was one of the youngest people in attendance and I ain't that young. That said, the presentations were excellent. Associate Professor Richard Chauvel gave a great overview of the democratic transformation and decentralisation of Indonesia and what this means for regional independence movements, and barristers John Rutherford and Brian Walters gave detailed summaries of the extraordinary scope of Australia's anti-terrorist laws. A moot point was whether AWB executives could be charged with terrorism for siphoning money off to Saddam Hussein's regime.

If there was a negative, it was the final session on peace in the middle east which included Sam Haddad (Lebanese Christian view), John Cohen (Jewish perspective) and Issam Nabulsi (Muslim perspective). All seemed to assume that their point of view was the correct one; none addressed the possibility of secular democracy with universal rights. Cohen was particularly belligerent, the quietly spoken Nabulsi argued for a "true" Islamic state and Haddad suggested that Lebanon was attacked by Israel because they have the best chance of competing against that State. It is little wonder that Prof. Joe Camilleri said in summing up "Perhaps we ought to ask whether religion is the solution or the problem in the Middle East".

Also convened an executive meeting of Prosper Australia on Thursday and attended their housing and homelessness forum on Friday. Ken Fernandes gave an excellent overview of the situation in South East Asia and the Indian sub-continient where he has done most of his work as part of the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights. Also last Sunday week gave my paper on "The Age of Spiritual Machines" (not online yet) which was very well received; I think Kurzweil has made a basic mathematical error in his book however. Some gaming has occurred as well, natch; finished module U3 in our Norman Britian game, generated some characters for the "Aesheba", Greek Africa Everyway game, saved people from pirates (arrgh!) in DragonQuest and finished the Crystal Palace orbital Cybernoia scenario.