Barbara van Schewick: Internet Architecture and Innovation (2010)

The Internet’s remarkable growth has been fueled by innovation. New applications continually enable new ways of using the Internet, and new physical networking technologies increase the range of networks over which the Internet can run. Questions about the relationship between innovation and the Internet’s architecture have shaped the debates over open access to broadband networks, network neutrality, nondiscriminatory network management, and future Internet architecture. In Internet Architecture and Innovation, Barbara van Schewick explores the economic consequences of Internet architecture, offering a detailed analysis of how it affects the economic environment for innovation.

Van Schewick describes the design principles on which the Internet’s original architecture was based—modularity, layering, and the end-to-end arguments—and shows how they shaped the original architecture. She analyzes in detail how the original architecture affected innovation—in particular, the development of new applications—and how changing the architecture would affect this kind of innovation.

Van Schewick concludes that the original architecture of the Internet fostered application innovation. Current changes that deviate from the Internet’s original design principles reduce the amount and quality of application innovation, limit users’ ability to use the Internet as they see fit, and threaten the Internet’s ability to realize its economic, social, cultural, and political potential. If left to themselves, network providers will continue to change the internal structure of the Internet in ways that are good for them but not necessarily for the rest of us. Government intervention may be needed to save the social benefits associated with the Internet’s original design principles.

Publisher MIT Press, 2010
ISBN 0262013975, 9780262013970
560 pages

publisher
google books

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Marleen Wynants, Jan Cornelis (eds.): How Open Is the Future? Economic, Social and Cultural Scenarios inspired by Free & Open Source Software (2008)

In this book a wide range of free-thinking programmers, scientists, artists, designers, engineers, activists, researchers and scholars express their views about various ways of creating and sharing knowledge in an age characterised by thephenomenal rise of the Internet and the growing tendency to protect all intellectual property.

There are two reasons why the free and open-source software issue has become such an inspirational and powerful force today: the rise of the Internet and the growing tendency to protect all intellectual property. Internet technology made it possible to handle massive decentralized projects and irreversibly changed our personal communication and information research. Intellectual property, on the other hand, is a legal instrument which – due to recent excesses – became the symbol of exactly the opposite of what it had been developed for: the protection of the creative process. As a result, free-thinking programmers, scientists, artists, designers, engineers and scholars are daily trying to come up with new ways of creating and sharing knowledge.

Publisher Asp / VUB Press / Upa, Brussel, 2008
Crosstalks Series
ISBN 9054873787, 9789054873785
534 pages

publisher
google books

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Stephen Travis Pope: Sound and Music Processing in SuperCollider (1998)

“SuperCollider is a powerful and flexible programming language for sound and image synthesis and processing. It was developed by James McCartney of Austin, Texas, and is the result of more than five years of development, including the Pyrite and Synth-omatic systems from which SuperCollider is derived. The somewhat odd name of the language is derived from its creator’s obsession with the superconducting supercollider project that was planned to be undertaken in his home state of Texas, but never funded.

The SuperCollider compiler and run-time system has been implemented on Apple Macintosh and Be computers (more ports are projected), and can execute quite complicated instruments in real time on “middle-class” Macintoshs (see the notes below on its performance). This book is a step-by-step tutorial on SuperCollider programming; it is aimed at musicians who want to use it for musical sound synthesis and processing.”

“This book is an introduction to the SC language aimed at readers who have some programming background (such as knowing another sound synthesis language or a general-purpose language like C or Smalltalk). It is not meant to substitute for the SC manual, to which I indeed refer the reader in numerous places.”

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Code examples