Once again, I have stretched the editorial deadline for this message. But this time, I have an excuse: I suffered a catastrophic disk crash. In between getting the new disk from the manufacturer and reinstalling all the software, I also paid a disk recovery service more than $2,000 to restore my data from the damaged disk. They succeeded, and all was well.

But this horrific experience was more than the opportunity to complain to (I hope) sympathetic ears. The experience brought home for me (in a way that no article, workshop, or discussion at a conference has done) the value of information—what is now known as intellectual property, or IP for short. Because my company had backed up most of my work data, it was only my personal data that needed recovery, so I paid my own money to retrieve it. My wife said to me, "We're putting our shed into your computer." Indeed, I paid the equivalent of three or more desktop computers for the information that was contained in my old system.

And it was worth it to me. All my stories, poems, and papers, all the things I have written in my career—they were worth the $2,000 I paid to get them back.

The US is making the transition from a manufacturing to an information economy. Information is now a valuable commodity, and to give it away is to give away money. US laws and business practices are lagging behind this reality, but they are gradually catching up. When scientists publish papers, more and more they need to clear them through the corporate legal department. Businesses look on publication of technical papers as a business decision, not a technical or academic one. Universities no longer give away research results for free; IP agreements with businesses are the norm and often take precedence over the "publish or perish" mantra.

When you write a paper, attend a conference, read a proceedings, or participate in a workshop, you are exchanging money. To those of us (including myself) who take a more academic view of the industry and research, this is a very unpalatable truth; however, it remains a truth. In the past, such academic sharing of information was an exchange that (in most cases) had no other specific value than to support the industry and the scientific community as a whole. Now, in most cases, published information does have a monetary value, and in a capitalistic society (and indeed, in a human society), it changes the entire character of what a technical committee does. Attending a conference is now a business activity.

This truth does not mean that we need to suddenly begin negotiating the value of each paper and establish a "research economy." Thousands of engineers spend significant amounts of time developing and giving away software because they love the activity, and because they like helping other computer engineers. What it does mean is that, when we exchange information because we believe it to be the right thing to do, we are also engaging in an economic and a business activity. Microsoft spends a significant amount of its marketing strategy countering Linux's all-free software, which makes a significant dent in Microsoft's bottom line. Some companies make their living off of supporting "free" software. The total effort going into the production of free software, as with freely shared technical research, is staggering.

The new information-based economy affects our professional activities in other ways. Standards bodies are increasingly corporate in nature and in voting; more and more standards working groups are moving to corporate support and voting. This is more than a stylistic change; many people (including myself) believe it is having a negative effect on the quality of the standards being produced. Certainly, there have been pejorative comments comparing the quality of papers submitted to conferences with that of marketing releases.

Identifying the situation is not the same as deciding what to do about it. How do we react to the transformation of technical information exchange into a technical information market? That is for each of us to decide. However, never have individual integrity and individual decisions been more important.

One day early in my career, my supervisor called me into his office and asked me to change my vote on a standard because of the effect it would have on the company. I acquiesced, and it is one of my deepest regrets. It probably means little in the history of CAD standards, but it means a great deal to me and my personal integrity. Pressures are now, if anything, stronger and more apt to pull in the opposite direction from technical excellence than ever before. I, perhaps more than anyone, do not underestimate the difficulty of basing decisions on technical excellence above all other considerations.

The transformation of our economy into an information- and IP-based economy raises the stakes for everyone in a technical profession. Never has technical research been more important to the bottom line. The design gap guarantees that these questions will be at least as sharp in the CAD industry as in any other. It affects all our professional activities. Each of us must find our way in this situation, with due regard to our responsibilities to our employers, the industry, and our personal integrity.

David L. Barton

DATC chair

Data Compression Conference (DCC 2006)

Snowbird, Utah

28-30 March 2006

http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~dcc

9th Euromicro Conference on Digital System Design: Architectures, Methods, and Tools (DSD 2006)

Cavtat, Croatia

30 August-1 September 2006

http://www.dsdconf.org

5th IFIP Working Conference on Distributed and Parallel Embedded Systems (DIPES 2006)

Braga, Portugal

11-13 October 2006

http://www.c-lab.de/dipes

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THIS NEWSLETTER: Please send any contributions to Joe Damore, 36 Hagan Drive, Poughkeepsie, NY 12603; phone +1 845 462 1364; fax +1 845 463 4311; joepdamore@aol.com.