By Dan Gillmor
SiliconValley.com
April 27, 2003
SLIS Summary
The Open Source Applications Foundation recently reached an important milestone. It posted some software code on the Internet and invited programmers around the world to offer suggestions and improvements.
The posting was an early version of "Chandler," an open-source personal information manager, e-mail and calendar program. The project and the foundation (www.osafoundation.org) are the brainchild of Mitch Kapor, a key figure in the personal-computer industry who wants to create a new platform for innovation.
At the end of March, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (www.mellon.org) awarded the project a $98,000 grant. The money is being used to see if Chandler can serve the needs of large universities.
Moving into a Digital Age, it's essential that the foundation community recognize the need to keep tomorrow's information architecture as open as possible.
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (www.macfound.org), best known for its "genius grants" to innovative individuals, last year launched an initiative to fund projects "that contribute to a balance between the needs of creators and the public in intellectual-property laws, regulations and practices." A few specific areas in the intellectual-property arena are worthy of social investment by foundations:
Hollywood and the music industry have controlled both the debate and the law surrounding the rights of copyright holders versus the rights of the public. Educating people about what they're losing in this war is essential.
Last year, the MacArthur Foundation awarded $1.2 million over three years to Creative Commons (www.creativecommons.org), a project affiliated with Stanford University designed to beef up the public domain by helping authors who want to reserve some, but not all, rights they would ordinarily have under current copyright law.
The U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (PTO) is infamous for its willingness to issue absurd patents. This is creating a drag on innovation as companies fight off unfair claims and spend uncreative time and money getting their own, defensive patents. Some foundation should fund a legal swat team that challenges bad patents.
Some companies sell products that help Internet users find and eradicate spy-ware. Savvy computer users can encrypt their communications. But encryption still is not easy to use in basic communications such as e-mail, at least for the average person, and the marketplace hasn't responded. Some organization should seed the development of a robust privacy toolkit that includes easy-to-use encryption.
Fixing high-level problems wasn't the motive of the Mellon when it gave money to the Chandler Project. The goal was to address a smaller, serious problem in the education field--handling electronic calendars. Commercial software can do some of the job, but universities have needs commercial vendors aren't satisfying.
Ira Fuchs, vice president for research in information technology at Mellon, is enthusiastic about open-source software, which specifically permits users to see and modify the underlying code at no cost.
But he's more interested in promoting open standards for use in the educational community, because open standards lead to innovation. When Mellon funds something in this area, he says, it must be made "freely available for academic use, instruction and research."
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http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/5728534.htm
Posted May 01, 2003