(No, I didn’t read the 80 page essay this article references.)
I found this particularly interesting:
The phenomenon of sharing physical goods has important implications for a number of public policy debates today, most notably for regulation of the use of radio spectrum. Around the world, regulators have granted licences, giving mobile-phone companies the rights to use a specific band of the airwaves, often in exchange for billions of dollars. Spectrum is parcelled out in this way under the assumption that more than one signal on the same frequency results in interference. This has been true until recently, but today radios with cheap microprocessors can pick out competing signals intelligently, just as the human ear can make sense of a conversation in a noisy bar. The result is that new technology has made the sharing of spectrum possible—radio waves could be a non-rivalrous good—if only this were legally permitted and engineered into the software that runs the wireless devices. Regulators have changed their approaches slightly by allowing secondary markets in spectrum, but this anachronistically still presumes exclusive, not shared, use.
I’ve also considered joining in on an open source project in order to get job marketability. I don’t think I could justify it “just for fun,” but if I felt I was increasing usable experience I may just take the plunge.
