Final Open Source Reflections

After experiencing Open Source first hand during the Food Computer project, I found that this both reinforced and challenged notions I held about the efficacy of Open Source.    In general, I believe that Open Source can be a great way to solve big problems such as food deserts, hunger, and resource constraints due to…

An Inconvenient Truth and the Social Impact of Awareness Films

  An Inconvenient Truth is a 2006 documentary film about Al Gore’s campaign that served as a successful social advocacy campaign and galvanized the public into global warming awareness and action.  Produced by Laurence Bender and directed by Davis Guggenheim, An Inconvenient Truth has been credited for raising international awareness of global warming at the…

Open Source Healthcare

The health industry has dabbled in open source since the dot-com bubble of 1999 – 2001 (1).  Open source services around the world develop software for EMRs, physician practice management packages, diagnostic image viewers, and other tools.  Now in the midst of a more energized open source community and other proven success of open source…

Open Source Design for Infrastructure

Open source design has the potential to play and crucial role in the development of next generation infrastructure.  As third world countries develop rapidly and even leapfrog first world countries there is a massive opportunity to equip new cities with smart and resilient infrastructure.  Moreover, first world countries – especially America — are planning to…

Open Source Communication Technology, IoT, and its impact on innovation and competitive advantages

Open Source communication software and hardware have a variety of advantages and disadvantages in the marketplace, in their potential for adoption, and in their requirements for deployment.  As a variety of proprietary and open source communication technologies compete for market penetration, the success of either type will have advantages and disadvantages to innovation and the…

Open Source Agriculture and Ogura’s proprietary hybrid seeds

  In my previous blog posts, I explored the benefits of open source design and intellectual property in a variety of industries.  Each of those posts discussed the trade-off between the need to offer incentives to invest in innovation and the need to spread innovations for positive social change.  In this blog post, I will…

The Benefits of Open Source Education v. Four-Year Institutions

Open education is a practice and philosophy in which educators collaborate to produce, share, and build on knowledge that is made accessible to everyone in the world.  The philosophy aspires to combat inequality with the belief that if everyone has access to high quality education, then more people can use this education to lift themselves…

IP and Open Source Design in Green Energy

Does intellectual property protect and proliferate progress in green energy and the renewable industry?  How can open source support more companies to pursue environmentally responsible business models?  How is the renewable energy industry distributed across type of energy and country?  In this essay, I will first describe some relevant data on patent filings in the…

Does IP Law widen Income Inequality?

I will examine the question of whether or not IP laws widen the income gap through the Oracle v. Google case.  At issue in this lawsuit is “whether Oracle can claim copyright on Java APIs and whether Google infringes these copyrights.” In short, Google used code from the Java API whose IP rights are owned…

Commercial Benefits of Open Source Products and Services

Intellectual property is important to innovation because it protects and incentivizes inventors to commercialize and monetize their ideas.  However, if certain inventions were made open source some say that innovation would accelerate.  Others believe open sourcing software, machines, or systems would prevent commercialization.  In this blog post, I will explain ways in which I believe…