Last night I heard Professor Yochai Benkler of Yale Law School speak at the Berkman Center at Harvard. He was promoting his new book, The Wealth of Networks, which came out late last week. I've been following Prof. Benkler since reading his essay, Coase's Penguin, on the economics of open source and peer production, so I had already downloaded the pdf of his book and skimmed the introduction.
Since I have followed his work, there were many things is his talk which were familiar, for example the many proof points on the growth of open source software (Apache, Linux, etc.) and peer production of intellectual property (Wikipedia). One interesting thing that I hadn't seen before was this diagram (also as Figure 2.1 on page 47 of the book):
IBM has traditionally been a patents power house. And I was aware that IBM has a major push in support of Linux, but I'd never put it in perspective with their IPR programs. Of course, $2B is less than 3% of their revenues, but this is an impressive graph none-the-less.
Thanks for visiting my blog and posting a comment about Pakistan's deledensity. I have posted a response to your comment and I am copying it here:
Yes you have missed something because teledensity is mobile phones+landphones (fixed phones). That is why it is 22%. However, I have put too much emphasis on mobile phones only and that perhaps led you to have the confusion.
Posted by: Razib Ahmed | April 19, 2006 at 02:58 PM
Harvard's Berkman Center has just posted an audio podcast by Yochai Benkler made during his recent visit. Go here to access it:
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/home/home?wid=10&func=viewSubmission&sid=1004
Posted by: brough | April 24, 2006 at 11:37 AM