Venkatesh Hariharan is Corporate Affairs Director (Asia-Pacific) at Red Hat. In this role, he works with industry, academia, government and the community to accelerate the growth of the global open source movement. In 2006, he was awarded the "Indian Open Source Personality of the Year" by the organizers of Linux Asia 2006.
Hariharan is a former Executive Editor of Express Computer and the first
Indian to be selected for the prestigious Knight Science Journalism
Fellowship (1998-99) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a
Knight Fellow, Hariharan spent a year looking at cutting edge
technologies that can be deployed for bridging the digital divide.
During his stint at Express Computer, he imparted a dynamic news
orientation to the magazine. He has interviewed some of the leading
figures in the world of technology including Microsoft's Bill Gates,
John Gage of Sun Microsystems, Stan Shih of the Acer Group and many
others. He has written for leading Indian and international publications
including MIT Technology Review, Upside, Slashdot, Economic Times, Times of India and others.
After his stint at MIT, Hariharan co-founded of IndLinux.org, one of the
leading localization groups in the India subcontinent. IndLinux.org has
localized the GNOME and KDE interface of Linux to Hindi and other Indian languages. IndLinux.org has helped localization groups in India, Bhutan, Nepal and other countries localize Linux and other open source software to their native languages.
Hariharan believes that open source and free software are powerful tools to empower emerging economies with the benefits of information technology. He has advocated the adoption of open source and open standards in emerging economies for political, cultural and economic reasons through his writing and his speeches.
His long term interest is in the area of technology and public policy. He maintains a blog on open source and open standards at http://www.osindia.blogspot.com.
Contrarian, I think you have missed the point of my article. When the government grants a 20 year monopoly, thus creating "intellectual property," it is taking what was previously in the "knowledge commons" and turning it into private property. How far should such privatization and propertization go? Should there be absolutely no limits on such propertization? Should children have to license the patent for "Method for swinging on a swing" before they rush out to the playground?
You say that, "what best motivates man is the reward that results from doing work." By reward, are you implying "financial rewards" or also including the reputation, satisfaction, fun and other intangible rewards that accompany innovation? Read the works of people like Richard Feynman and you realize that the drive to innovate is an intrinsic drive. The propaganda that financial motivation is the biggest motivation has been repeated ad nauseam. If that were the only (or primary motivation) much of open source software would not have existed. It's not a random thing that Linus Torvald's biography is titled, "Just for Fun."
"the alleged US penchant for hoarding information" are your words not mine.
India's traditional knowledge database compiles what is already public knowledge in disciplines like yoga and ayurveda. As to why they require an NDA, you should ask them since I am not their spokesperson.
I like the distinction you make between, "capturing knowledge that defines useful things" and knowledge itself. If used well, I agree with you that it can be, as you say, "a very efficient mechanism to incentivize its creation and to compile that information in a societally beneficial way." Unfortunately the evidence from sources far more authoritative than I am, is that the system that was meant to create incentives is now actively creating disincentives.
For further reading, I would suggest:
"Innovation and Its Discontents: How Our Broken Patent System Is Endangering Innovation and Progress, and What to Do About It" (Princeton, 2004).
http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/chapters/i7810.html
Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk
http://www.researchoninnovation.org/dopatentswork/
Regards,
Venky