Hardware manufacturers like Apple, Nokia, etc. etc. would love to get you to buy each new release of hardware that they make. Since computers started out as very expensive pieces of hardware, the whole computer industry was built around making computers upgradable, especially by updating the software. Smart phones and PDAs started out as relatively cheap electronic gadgets, so there wasn’t such a huge pressure to make them last. To speed up this trend, most PDA and mobile phone manufacturers do not support or even allow software updates.

Even proprietary software companies behave similarly. It doesn’t matter whether Windows 2000 was working fine for many people, Microsoft discontinued support for it regardless. These actions are also driven by their business model of selling software as if it was a physical thing. You pay for it once up front, but now they are expected to release updates even though the customers are no longer paying.

Not surprisingly, we now have a crazy cycle where the hardware is designed to be disposable. Mobile phones are often so buggy, they crash when making phone calls. This isn’t the result of some conspiracy fomented by some hidden cabal. This is the result of the way the industry is structured, and the idea that software should be treated as a physical thing. If the industry was structured around free software, we’d see very different behavior. This article outlines the issue quite nicely:

Open Source, the only weapon against “planned obsolescence”

There is a myth of science that has developed over the centuries: science is an open process. Of course, scientists strive to publish their results, and educate their students. But these alone do not make for an open process. Perhaps centuries ago, these practices were more open than the previous practices, but in the twenty-first century, academic science is far from a model of openness. I agree that the scientific method and academic should be open, but it is far from open in reality. There are many problems with it, here are some off the top of my head:

- limited access publishing (e.g. Elsevier): It is so expensive to get access to most academic scientific journals that many universities and colleges in the US, let alone less rich nations, do not subscribe to a lot of them. The Public Library of Science is doing en excellent job of publishing true, open access journals: http://plos.org

- closed access data: Although there is a lot of pressure for academic scientists to publish their results, there no such pressure to publish the source, i.e. the raw data that the results were based on. If the gatherer of the data, doesn’t publish it, it remains totally locked away behind a wall of copyright. So this definitely isn’t open source, since no one can get to the source to try their own analysis. Science Commons is talking about this issue some, http://sciencecommons.org/

- completely closed process: many if not most scientific labs are super secretive about what they are working on because they want to be the first to publish, and they believe that restricting access to this process will help guarantee them future grants.

So compared to free software, current academic science completely fails in the these three regards, and perhaps others. The New York Times recently ran an article about what they call “open-source science”. It seems to be mostly about funding research via cash prizes and is very vague on the details. It almost reads like PR for the companies featured.

As for this funding model, I think that this model of using a competition for prize model can be useful for some developments, but it needs to be one of many approaches. If this was the only funding model, we would be worse off. For example, in the drug industry, it is well demonstrated that the for-profit R&D model is very good at successive improvement of existing techniques, but bad at all other types of research. Basically all groundbreaking drug research is done by government funded R&D that has very few direct returns to the funding agency. So these two different funding models complement each other.

Jacob Winiecki, a friend of mine, is working on setting up self-sustaining businesses based on simple technology in developing countries; for example, replacing kerosene lamps with solar lamps by helping people set up importing businesses, distribution businesses, and local solar lamp rental businesses. This is done by finding workable business models, then working with microfinance banks to set up standard loan products based on these business models.

Now, there is starting to be a lot of attention being focused on mobile phones and internet. People barely ever make calls, it’s far too expensive. The most popular uses by far are texting and money transfers by sending airtime minutes via SMS. Of course, lots of people are very excited by this idea, but it reminds me of when I worked at a dotcom and we were doing banking sites in the late nineties. No one gave a shit about security then, so now we have a flood of phishing and assorted other attacks. This same thing is happening with these mobile mobile transfers, and the microfinance banks are starting to get involved.

I think the time is ripe to nip this in the bud. These services are just starting up now. They are well enough established to see how things work, but not so well established that they can change a lot yet. If people had paid real attention to the security issues about online banking in the late nineties, things would be far better now. We have the opportunity to learn from our gross mistakes, let’s not repeat this mistake.

Here’s one example service from Kenya:

Safaricom M-PESA