
Compulsory Licensing of Backroom IT? - nabla9
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/07/compulsory-licensing-of-backroom-it.html
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clawrencewenham
Almost all of the software I've written is as useless outside of the company
as air pockets taken out of a loaf of bread.

The big-rectangle diagram of what I do is fetch data from A, apply B(A), and
send the result to Z. This is great when A is a proprietary API delivered over
long-poll HTTP, B(A) converts it into a vocabulary common to just our
products, and Z is Websockets to a mobile app. When we add a new customer who
uses A2 all I do is write B2() and the rest stays the same.

Outside of the company, it's useless. There are thousands of products that do
the same thing for different flavours of A, B and C. However, we can get our
particular product to our target markets a year earlier than someone starting
from scratch.

Compulsorily licensed to a competitor, they'd barely be able to install it
because it's not packaged like a product. There's an old database that has
evolved over more than a decade that's as crusty as an old fishing boat's
keel. If a "good compulsory licensing scheme" would compensate the company for
packaging it and writing manuals for it, then it's looking at millions of
dollars just in the opportunity costs of taking the lead developers off other
projects.

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de_watcher
Wow, I actually have time to maintain that thing so it looks like any other
program in some Linux distribution.

That way it's as boring as possible, which is good for the focus on the real
function.

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chrisseaton
> It seems that making good backroom software, to use internally, has become
> something of a natural monopoly. Creating such IT has large fixed costs and
> big random factors.

I can't understand this. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Oracle, Microsoft,
countless others, all have their own huge backroom IT software projects.

Which one of them is supposed to have a monopoly on it?

People just seem to throw around 'monopoly' to mean nothing more than 'some
large number of companies are able to achieve some things that others aren't'.
Some other people just seem to use it for 'company that I think is too
successful'.

There's no point in the word any more.

I think part of the problem is people feel free to define the group that can
have a monopoly in any way they want. Is the intention here that 'large
talented companies' have a monopoly on backroom IT software? If we're going to
define groups however we want I can say things like 'people who are good at
football have a monopoly on playing football professionally'.

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daveFNbuck
I thought the article was pretty clear on what the issue is. A lot of capital
is going into building proprietary IT and society would benefit if more people
could make use of it.

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freeone3000
It's a bit silly. That's like saying a lot of capital is going into
proprietary plumbing and society would benefit if more people could make use
of it. The software is implicitly linked to the people and processes.

Open source software development absolutely has a purpose. Licensing
absolutely has a purpose. But generalization is a well-known cost for those in
tech, and marketing is a well-known cost at general.

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daveFNbuck
I don't think that anyone is claiming that there aren't tradeoffs. You seem to
agree that there are times when licensing provides a benefit to society that
outweighs the cost of generalization. I don't think it's silly to suggest that
companies aren't always in the best position to weigh their own costs against
the larger benefits to society.

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pjc50
> Addendum: "Okay, so far the pretty consistent answer I’ve heard is that it
> is very hard to take software written for internal use and make it available
> for outside use. Even if you insist outsiders do things your way."

Yes, largely these days process software _is_ the business - it defines the
structure, employee roles, how business units interact, how internal
accountability works, and so on.

That's why modern startups can contract out in a pure Coase style both
employees (Uber etc) and capital assets (AirBnB); only the software is the
irreducible core of the business.

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sleepychu
> _Note that while compulsory licensing of patents is rare in the US, it is
> common worldwide, and it one of the reasons that US drug firms get
> proportionally less of their revenue from outside the US_

Wow. I was totally unaware of this. Short term exclusivity is common but I
didn't realise that in the US it was commonly for the duration of the patent!

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zaphar
This rings true to me. I think Google's biggest competitive advantage is not
network effects, brand awareness, or eyeballs for advertisers. Their biggest
advantage is that no one runs datacenters better than Google. Amazon is a
close second but I would be willing to bet that Google is more efficient by
potentially as much as an order of magnitude.

Similarly they invest heavily in development and IT tooling. It allows them to
scale in ways that very few other companies can.

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filleokus
I think it practically would be very challenging to achieve something like
this, unless the company is interested in selling the service/product it is
probably very hard to force them to make a compelling offer to the market. The
Walmart bar code reader for example, what was really the inovation/edge there?
I guess that is was probably not the physical hardware but rather a deep and
complex integration into the internal systems, which would be next to useless
for anyone but Walmart.

We also see some voluntary licensing of at least software, not seldomly free
of charge (and open source). It's probably easier to build something like
Facebook today, thanks to frameworks open sourced by Facebook themselves (i.e
React). Getting access to hosting at scale is also easier and importantly less
capital intensive than before, thanks to the cloud providers, who at least
partly, make their internal hosting infra accessible for outsiders.

However, it's not like the big players are open sourcing/selling their most
important stuff. AirBnb is not successful thanks to their server side
javascript rendering library, but them giving it away is nevertheless helpful
for someone trying to disrupt them.

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jdietrich
Patents ostensibly offer a tradeoff - you have the right to a temporary
monopoly on your invention, on the condition that you publish an explanation
of your invention sufficient for a third-party to re-create it. It is not a
unilateral gift to inventors, but a quid-pro-quo to encourage the public
dissemination of new technologies.

Modern patent practices have diminished the latter part of that tradeoff; many
contemporary patents protect only one small part of an invention, or are
sufficiently obscure and complex to provide little value to a third party. The
rate of technological change has greatly accelerated, which has drastically
changed the value of a twenty-year monopoly; many computer-related patents
become obsolete long before the patent expires.

I think there is a serious need to review the basic mechanisms of the patent
system, because it has gradually transmuted into something fundamentally
different. In a great many cases, patents inhibit rather than encourage
innovation.

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loukrazy
Isn’t public IaaS and PaaS exactly what he is talking about? Amazon, Google,
Microsoft selling the exact software and infrastructure they use to operate at
scale. So maybe regulated prices for Cloud services? But they already seem
pretty low because of competition.

Access to massive data is the real value that these companies have exclusive
access to, not IT infrastructure

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paulsutter
To create true competitors to Google, give them access to Google's running
datacenters and codebase, just as Google employees have. They need the data
even more than code, and the only practical mechanism is (readonly) access to
the running systems. Let them hire Google employees too. Ditto for Facebook,
Twitter, etc.

(I'm not advocating for this, just trying to interpret a practical means for
what he's suggesting. This could be a direction for antitrust)

As stated, “backroom IT” sounds like random crap middleware plumbing. But I
don’t think that’s what he means to refer to.

