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It's great to see someone advocating for alternative points of view with respect to IP. It's a moot point though. Artisanal hardware is an intellectual dead en

It's great to see someone advocating for alternative points of view with respect to IP. It's a moot point though. Artisanal hardware is an intellectual dead end. Cost and IP and economics and whatever are a bunch of red herrings. Hardware standardization is pretty much always superior to fragmentation. I've never heard a hardware engineer advocate for fragmentation! Bunnie Huang should be advocating for the artisanal manufacture of software. Then again, it really begs the question, why don't we use any software that comes out of east Asia? Or let's say you buy into sales and profit and economics and mom-and-pop artisanal crafts and whatever as being in and of themselves valuable. It's not happening in Shenzhen with respect to software. The answer is not as simple as localization. Bunnie is having a particularly reductive IP conversation, where there's no law and it's just whatever unwritten cultural norms you personally favor rule the land and can be enforced violently. The IP conversation must be bigger than that, because we live in a world where all the major tech companies, not just Chinese ones, are copying each other's features. And yet, nobody's calling that a lawless Shenzhen world. It's not really about copying or original inventions or any of what he's talking about! So lemme ask you this: would you rather subscribe to an IP policy in the service of an idiosyncratic electronics hardware community? Or would you rather subscribe to whatever IP theory lets you write good software? I'd choose the later. That theory is "Whatever the license says," and the diversity of licenses and their social impact speaks for themselves. For that to work, you have to respect the rule of law. Which isn't saying much! More importantly, lawyers are innovative too. That legal work around OSS licenses has had a much bigger, much more positive impact on the quality of software than a fuck-the-IP-law attitude going on in Shenzhen.

sanxiyn 8y ago
> Why don't we use any software that comes out of east Asia? I do, and you should too. For example, I evaluated mobile-focused neural net inference software and ncnn from Tencent came on top: https://github.com/Tencent/ncnn https://github.com/Tencent/ncnn
mc32 8y ago
TrendMicro which is Taiwanese/Japanese -well known and used.
User23 8y ago
> why don't we use any software that comes out of east Asia? I hear Ruby is pretty popular.
ohazi 8y ago
> Then again, it really begs the question, why don't we use any software that comes out of east Asia? Or let's say you buy into sales and profit and economics and mom-and-pop artisanal crafts and whatever as being in and of themselves valuable. It's not happening in Shenzhen with respect to software. Because the approach that Shenzhen uses for hardware is rarely the same approach that they use with software, and their software approach is generally not something to be emulated. We may get a lot of wacky gizmos out of China, but the vast majority of them run unmodified or craptastically modified Android/Linux/vendor BSP. The software model that's closest to what Bunnie describes in Shenzhen is the plain old open-source model. To get good quality software, you need to put significant time and resources into these open-source projects, and let people modify or fork them as they see fit. Really, the goals are just different. The goal of the Shenzhen model is diversity - "there are so many products out there, what should I make that's a little bit different?" The goal of most software is arguably quality and reliability. There's no shortage of software with silly features, and it's usually easy to add a silly feature to an open-source project if you really want something specific. This is often the kind of software modification I associate with the Shenzhen model. What's difficult is forking a project over an architectural disagreement and then fixing it, because you have to understand a lot more about how the software works before you can do that, and whatever documentation exists is likely to be in English.
- doctorpangloss 8y ago
  > The software model that's closest to what Bunnie describes in Shenzhen is the plain old open-source model My point is, that model only exists if you respect the rule of law and specifically conventional copyright. So the thing we can point to as a successful (in some conventional sense, as opposed to idiosyncratically "pro-artisanal" Bunnie Huang sense) demo of his theory exists because of, not in spite of Western IP law!
  - sgeisler 8y ago
    You can make this argument when it comes to GPL software, since it forces you to open source your changes if you want to ship them. But does it hold for MIT licensed software (or if you are picky about attribution CC0)? Couldn't the existence of MIT or CC0 licensed open source projects disprove that > that model only exists if you respect the rule of law and specifically conventional copyright because these licenses are basically blank checks to do with the software whatever you want? They don't really depend on the existence of any IP laws.
gkanai 8y ago
> why don't we use any software that comes out of east Asia? Ruby Language is driven by Matz from Japan. I'm sure there are other projects from East Asia as well that I can't name at the moment. If you're using a Nintendo Switch or a Playstation, those are also developed by Japanese companies in East ASia. If you want to look at smartphone apps developed in East Asia, there are many that are very influential such as Line in Japan, Kakao in Korea, WeChat and Alipay in China, etc. Granted these smartphone apps use either Java or Objective-C but they are 'made in East Asia." In fact, for the China smartphone market, because China blocks most non-Chinese Internet services via the Great Firewall (i.e. Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) the vast majority of Chinese apps are made in China. If you don't live in China or Japan or Korea, you probably don't use the apps that are made for those markets.
- askvictor 8y ago
  I suspect that by East Asia, the comment meant China (or hadn't really thought about it too hard).
sgeisler 8y ago
> But artisanal hardware is an intellectual dead end. I agree that this model of iterative improvement won't yield the next big technological breakthrough. But the big consumer electronics manufacturers aren't really innovating either. They might make a product a little bit flatter or give it another camera, but I can't think of a real game changer in the last five years. Once all the technology is there and just improves iteratively the described model seems to be better suited to find as many local optima in the possible product space as possible (and not just a few big ones). I could see how a lack of patents would lead to more secrecy in R&D labs. If what you are doing is truly novel and complicated (like developing a smaller node type in processor manufacturing) keeping the research secret would keep you as safe from competitors as patents. And if you aren't (like inventing rounded corners on smartphones) then you shouldn't have gotten the patent in the first place imho.
- archgoon 8y ago
  Well; the entire modern smartphone (post iPhone) industry is only a decade old. Expecting another revolution on par with the first in 5 years seems a pretty high bar to cross.
- cinquemb 8y ago
  >But the big consumer electronics manufacturers aren't really innovating either. Yet they continue to attract global capital investment flows that crowd out funding for others (like those R&D labs, because they have their own in house labs with no real pressure to get anything novel to market) to explore something that might yield the next breakthrough.
- ip26 8y ago
  They may not be innovating, but advancing the state of the art is a gradual process, and can by itself eventually open up new opportunity. Google's lauded Portrait mode probably flat out wouldn't have worked on the phones of ten years ago due to lacking computational power, and the steady advancement of x86 has ushered in software worlds beyond an i486, including things like entirely new programming languages that would not work well on 100MHz & 4MB of memory.
eitally 8y ago
Many, many enterprises use software developed in East Asia. There just aren't nearly as many software product companies as in the west. Primarily, afaict, it's because in developing economies like CHina & India (or the Philippines, or Vietnam, ...) there's been enough economic uplift from doing things for other people (IT outsourcing) that tackling the top end of the market hasn't been necessary.
- cinquemb 8y ago
  My problem as a westerner living in Asia for a couple of years, is that the type of retail products that I'm interested in (API's for various things from financial exchanges to consumer goods/services) that are available in the US and are actively marketed, aren't really available to retail users in Asia, and it's really hard to get people to care about it even while they are pitching you to use their mobile app/website. I know it might not be the best thing to say, but i'm glad that the global economy is starting another downturn with major industries that have provided a boon starting to lose the impact it's had because it will incentivize the marginal person to pursue new opportunities because they no longer have enough economic uplift.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
_emacsomancer_ 8y ago
> why don't we use any software that comes out of east Asia? I assume by "east Asia", you mean the People's Republic of China, and not, say, Japan or Korea. And do you mean software that comes out of Chinese companies? Certainly I use software developed in China, but usually by individual developers rather than a company. But think about smart phone software - certainly there is plenty that comes out of China, Korea and Japan.
speedplane 8y ago
> Hardware standardization is pretty much always superior to fragmentation. I think this is changing with the death of Moore's law. In the past, it was almost always better to follow conventional hardware standards because chips kept on getting better extremely quickly. In the 18 months or so it would take an engineering team to come up with some custom hardware, the general purpose Intel hardware would improve so much that it made more sense to wait than to make something custom. However now, Moore's law is pretty much dead. Processor performance is improving, but it's no longer on an exponential. Today, to gain an extra X% of performance, your best bet is often build your own hardware or ASIC customized to your particular use case. We see this everywhere now, with Apple building their own chips, folks making custom chips for AI and blockchain, and ARM's comparatively customizable architecture beating out Intel's relatively closed one. With the death of Moore's law, coupled with the unceasing desire to suck out more performance from similar hardware, we're now seeing far more fragmentation than we did in the 90s, 00s, or early 10s.

sanxiyn 8y ago

> Why don't we use any software that comes out of east Asia? I do, and you should too. For example, I evaluated mobile-focused neural net inference software and ncnn from Tencent came on top: https://github.com/Tencent/ncnn https://github.com/Tencent/ncnn

mc32 8y ago

TrendMicro which is Taiwanese/Japanese -well known and used.

User23 8y ago

> why don't we use any software that comes out of east Asia? I hear Ruby is pretty popular.

ohazi 8y ago

> Then again, it really begs the question, why don't we use any software that comes out of east Asia? Or let's say you buy into sales and profit and economics and mom-and-pop artisanal crafts and whatever as being in and of themselves valuable. It's not happening in Shenzhen with respect to software. Because the approach that Shenzhen uses for hardware is rarely the same approach that they use with software, and their software approach is generally not something to be emulated. We may get a lot of wacky gizmos out of China, but the vast majority of them run unmodified or craptastically modified Android/Linux/vendor BSP. The software model that's closest to what Bunnie describes in Shenzhen is the plain old open-source model. To get good quality software, you need to put significant time and resources into these open-source projects, and let people modify or fork them as they see fit. Really, the goals are just different. The goal of the Shenzhen model is diversity - "there are so many products out there, what should I make that's a little bit different?" The goal of most software is arguably quality and reliability. There's no shortage of software with silly features, and it's usually easy to add a silly feature to an open-source project if you really want something specific. This is often the kind of software modification I associate with the Shenzhen model. What's difficult is forking a project over an architectural disagreement and then fixing it, because you have to understand a lot more about how the software works before you can do that, and whatever documentation exists is likely to be in English.

doctorpangloss 8y ago
> The software model that's closest to what Bunnie describes in Shenzhen is the plain old open-source model My point is, that model only exists if you respect the rule of law and specifically conventional copyright. So the thing we can point to as a successful (in some conventional sense, as opposed to idiosyncratically "pro-artisanal" Bunnie Huang sense) demo of his theory exists because of, not in spite of Western IP law!
- sgeisler 8y ago
  You can make this argument when it comes to GPL software, since it forces you to open source your changes if you want to ship them. But does it hold for MIT licensed software (or if you are picky about attribution CC0)? Couldn't the existence of MIT or CC0 licensed open source projects disprove that > that model only exists if you respect the rule of law and specifically conventional copyright because these licenses are basically blank checks to do with the software whatever you want? They don't really depend on the existence of any IP laws.

gkanai 8y ago

> why don't we use any software that comes out of east Asia? Ruby Language is driven by Matz from Japan. I'm sure there are other projects from East Asia as well that I can't name at the moment. If you're using a Nintendo Switch or a Playstation, those are also developed by Japanese companies in East ASia. If you want to look at smartphone apps developed in East Asia, there are many that are very influential such as Line in Japan, Kakao in Korea, WeChat and Alipay in China, etc. Granted these smartphone apps use either Java or Objective-C but they are 'made in East Asia." In fact, for the China smartphone market, because China blocks most non-Chinese Internet services via the Great Firewall (i.e. Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) the vast majority of Chinese apps are made in China. If you don't live in China or Japan or Korea, you probably don't use the apps that are made for those markets.

askvictor 8y ago
I suspect that by East Asia, the comment meant China (or hadn't really thought about it too hard).

sgeisler 8y ago

> But artisanal hardware is an intellectual dead end. I agree that this model of iterative improvement won't yield the next big technological breakthrough. But the big consumer electronics manufacturers aren't really innovating either. They might make a product a little bit flatter or give it another camera, but I can't think of a real game changer in the last five years. Once all the technology is there and just improves iteratively the described model seems to be better suited to find as many local optima in the possible product space as possible (and not just a few big ones). I could see how a lack of patents would lead to more secrecy in R&D labs. If what you are doing is truly novel and complicated (like developing a smaller node type in processor manufacturing) keeping the research secret would keep you as safe from competitors as patents. And if you aren't (like inventing rounded corners on smartphones) then you shouldn't have gotten the patent in the first place imho.

archgoon 8y ago
Well; the entire modern smartphone (post iPhone) industry is only a decade old. Expecting another revolution on par with the first in 5 years seems a pretty high bar to cross.
cinquemb 8y ago
>But the big consumer electronics manufacturers aren't really innovating either. Yet they continue to attract global capital investment flows that crowd out funding for others (like those R&D labs, because they have their own in house labs with no real pressure to get anything novel to market) to explore something that might yield the next breakthrough.
ip26 8y ago
They may not be innovating, but advancing the state of the art is a gradual process, and can by itself eventually open up new opportunity. Google's lauded Portrait mode probably flat out wouldn't have worked on the phones of ten years ago due to lacking computational power, and the steady advancement of x86 has ushered in software worlds beyond an i486, including things like entirely new programming languages that would not work well on 100MHz & 4MB of memory.

eitally 8y ago

Many, many enterprises use software developed in East Asia. There just aren't nearly as many software product companies as in the west. Primarily, afaict, it's because in developing economies like CHina & India (or the Philippines, or Vietnam, ...) there's been enough economic uplift from doing things for other people (IT outsourcing) that tackling the top end of the market hasn't been necessary.

cinquemb 8y ago
My problem as a westerner living in Asia for a couple of years, is that the type of retail products that I'm interested in (API's for various things from financial exchanges to consumer goods/services) that are available in the US and are actively marketed, aren't really available to retail users in Asia, and it's really hard to get people to care about it even while they are pitching you to use their mobile app/website. I know it might not be the best thing to say, but i'm glad that the global economy is starting another downturn with major industries that have provided a boon starting to lose the impact it's had because it will incentivize the marginal person to pursue new opportunities because they no longer have enough economic uplift.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

_emacsomancer_ 8y ago

> why don't we use any software that comes out of east Asia? I assume by "east Asia", you mean the People's Republic of China, and not, say, Japan or Korea. And do you mean software that comes out of Chinese companies? Certainly I use software developed in China, but usually by individual developers rather than a company. But think about smart phone software - certainly there is plenty that comes out of China, Korea and Japan.

speedplane 8y ago

> Hardware standardization is pretty much always superior to fragmentation. I think this is changing with the death of Moore's law. In the past, it was almost always better to follow conventional hardware standards because chips kept on getting better extremely quickly. In the 18 months or so it would take an engineering team to come up with some custom hardware, the general purpose Intel hardware would improve so much that it made more sense to wait than to make something custom. However now, Moore's law is pretty much dead. Processor performance is improving, but it's no longer on an exponential. Today, to gain an extra X% of performance, your best bet is often build your own hardware or ASIC customized to your particular use case. We see this everywhere now, with Apple building their own chips, folks making custom chips for AI and blockchain, and ARM's comparatively customizable architecture beating out Intel's relatively closed one. With the death of Moore's law, coupled with the unceasing desire to suck out more performance from similar hardware, we're now seeing far more fragmentation than we did in the 90s, 00s, or early 10s.