[Discuss] Economic value of OSH work

[Matt Maier]

The discussion is cold, but it seems like the logical place to share this
link
http://www.managingip.com/Blog/3390962/The-value-of-an-open-source-dividend.html

"Sir John Sulston, a joint winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or
Medicine, once told KEI that research that is open to everyone is at least
nine times more valuable to society than research that is closed."

<p>In 2007, during work by MSF on a new innovation inducement
    prize for low-cost point-of-care diagnostics for tuberculosis,
    concerns about the negative impact of inducement prizes on
    secrecy were addressed by a proposal for an open source
    dividend (OSD). The initial proposal was for a percentage of
    inducement prize money to be allocated to persons who openly
    shared knowledge, data, materials and technology that was
    considered significant and useful in the development of the
    winning diagnostic test. This proposal was later incorporated
    in a series of legislative proposals by Senator Bernie Sanders
    for innovation inducement prize funds, and in several <a
    href="
http://healthresearchpolicy.org/content/open-source-dividend-prizes">
    developing country and NGO proposals for delinking R&D
    costs from product price at the WHO</a>. More recently the US
    Senate and the National Academies have expressed interest in
    further evaluating the OSD idea.</p>

    <p>The concept of the OSD has more general application than
    innovation inducement prizes. One could implement the OSD as
    part of more traditional business models for drug or software
    development. For example, if even 1% of patented drug sales in
    the United States were set aside into a fund for the OSD, there
    would be about $2.5 billion each year in rewards to persons who
    openly shared knowledge, data, materials and technology to drug
    developers. At 2% of sales, it would be almost $5 billion each
    year. The availability of the OSD would revolutionize
    university licensing policies, and also the policies of
    businesses that were holding as secrets research that was no
    longer under development. It would become a business decision
    to go open or closed.</p>


On Mon, Sep 8, 2014 at 5:37 AM, Javier Serrano <Javier.Serrano at cern.ch>
wrote:

> On 09/06/2014 05:51 PM, Joshua Pearce wrote:
> > Thank you to everyone with your good suggestions, references and
> thoughts.
> >
> > I have a much better understanding now and you brought up some
> > interesting points (which I will attribute)  I had not considered and
> > now will include in the paper in order to make an economic case for
> > government funding of FOSH development.
> >
> > The paper in the works - I will share with you when I have finished
> > running all the numbers and it is ready.
>
> Joshua, I think this is very important work and look forward to reading
> the paper when it's published. Going quantitative is indeed very hard
> but decision makers often face situations where they have to decide
> on subjects they don't fully master. Quantification is perceived to add
> objectivity, and I think funding agencies will be happy to get some
> numbers and an explanation, at least as a basis for discussion.
>
> I may be misguided, but I think one of the factors which may have pushed
> many governments to ask their publicly-financed universities to patent
> as many of their inventions as possible is that the patent world is easy
> to quantify. So if you buy the argument that more patents means more
> innovation and ultimately more welfare for your citizens, which some
> governments seem to believe, then it's easy to assess your success by
> counting patents and royalties from those patents. And there might be a
> temptation to be a bit sloppy with logic and promote easy
> quantifiability from an important feature that will allow evaluation of
> the success of a given course of action -- which has independently been
> deemed appropriate -- to an implicit reason supporting the
> appropriateness of that course of action itself.
>
> I don't have a clue about how to go quantitative with FOSH. At CERN, we
> know most of the people and companies who manufacture, distribute and
> support the hardware we design and publish, but the process of
> evaluating economic impact by regularly polling them seems cumbersome,
> error-prone and non-scalable. Maybe there are things to be learned from
> Google and other such companies, who succeed in convincing their clients
> to pay them because they are able to give a reasonably accurate
> estimation of the impact their services have on the sales of their
> clients. My understanding is that they do this through a combination of
> technology, societal models which are continuously validated and very
> powerful statistics artillery.
>
> Many thanks for your work. Cheers,
>
> Javier
> _______________________________________________
> discuss mailing list
> discuss at lists.oshwa.org
> http://lists.oshwa.org/listinfo/discuss
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.oshwa.org/pipermail/discuss/attachments/20141017/98e31d7f/attachment.html>