Areed, I wish Professor Horowitz had been able to share the examples he seemed to want to go into..
I realize that Limor mostly does stuff with digital electronics and so I understand itr but Professor Horowitz's going into the theory of diplexers, and so on. That was somethiing that I would have liked to hear.. Stuff like that is what makes RF fun and "cool" to my understanding..
I really enjoyed the Ask an enginer discussion about open source hardware.. a subject that I think nurturing it is the key to our countries future economic success, as the days when peopole could take a small micro, emulate something complicated, espensive analog or electoromachanical with it and charge thousands of dollars for it are ending fast. I people think that IP law can be used to lock in insane high profits and business models that are parasitical, forever, getting higher and higher all the time, even in a pandemic, they are smoking something.. Due to the Uruguay Round negotiations and the TRIPS and TRIMS agreements, the concept of "intellectual property" has been promagulated as natural. But its totally a creature of lobbyists and lobbying. We did finbe before 1995. And medicines and patents were respected. What changed in 1995 wasnt good.
was embedded in stone and the cost to many countries of that is much higher than the gains. Billions of dollars more in the case of Australia, according to Peter Drahos, who has written a lot about ahat he calls "infromation feudalism"
IP rights and markets are traded for IP recognition. IP is a totally artificial creation.. and it didnt even exist in its current form until January 1, 1995. Notice thats when the price of drugs, here in the US, the prices for even old off patent drugs (which started to vanish from drugstores in favor of newer on patent drugs many of which were less safe and effective than the old drugs they replaced) the prices of the drugs people needed started to soar? This drove a huge explosion in medical costs leading ti a great many people not being able to afford health insurance and falling deeply into medical debt. Which closed the doors of the healthcare system to them. For many years the poorest countries, even, were being asked to pay huge prices for drugs such as the lifesaving HIV drgs that it turned out only cost pennies to manufacture..; (an award winning 2013 film, Fire in the Blood, tells the incredible story)
Also the developed countries traded away jobs (which is only just beginning) to the developing countries in exchange for their recognition of the new IP insanity..They were promised they would make that money that they lose by recognizing IP back by
providing services globally.
THis is not an efficient solution because it depends on sending workers to the other side of the world, in essence making people to trad places in order to lower their wages,
But a new model exists now one that may be better.. The open source development model..
Lets not forget that innovation due to open source tools is potentially a very big aid to a modern economy.
Its possible now for a shmuck like me to become an electronics designer and manufacturer.. and a successful one..
Thats just amazing.. Almost all of the big gains in business of the last two or three decades WAS IN BUSINESS ENABLED BY THE AVAILABILITY OF OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE TOOLS..
Google, Apple, Facebook and amazon, all wouldnt exist if it was not for FOSS.. to name a few. Hardware can do similar things. All the basic tools of electronics shoulod be enabled by open source hardware and software tools and that investment will pay off big in creativity.
Hardware that seems to embed the open ethic of maximum flexibility that donesn't try to lock people into a walled ecosystem or similar is where its at now.
Contrast that to the practice of AT&T in the past of charging everybody in the country $24 a month to rent their telephone and not allowing anybody or anything else to connect to "their" network, That was what guys my age grew up with. Nooooo..
There are people who want to push us back to that. Look at the agricultural equipment company that wants to make their tractrs a money machine for them whenever they need repair. Bet you everybody who buys one of them lives to regret that decision.
We need a world of open agricultural equipment, that supports an active user community and facilitates low cost automation. people all around the world can use it to teach themselves a whole bunch of new skills. And save their family farms. The history of say, the British Empire in India is one where debt and food price manipulation led to a great many deaths and bankruptcies of families, almost by design. The way to prevent that is innovation that rewards people's efforts without requiring huge investments in hard currency farmers don't have.
TPTB need to understand that there is another way and its one with a spectacular track record of solving technical problems fast and well.
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