Yahoo!News reveals that “Dallas Federal Reserve President Richard Fisher warned on Monday against ‘Buy America’ provisions in a proposed fiscal stimulus law and said it could lead to devastating trade protectionism. ‘Let me just be blunt. Protectionism is the crack cocaine of economics. It may provide a high. It's addictive and it leads to economic death,’ Fisher told C-Span television in an interview for its ‘Washington Journal’ program. President Barack Obama seeks a $825 billion stimulus plan to end the country's yearlong recession. U.S. lawmakers are debating rules that will insist that public money is spent on U.S-made products, although the White House has already said it will review any Buy America provisions.”
The Washington Post reports that “Washington area venture capital investments fell 20 percent in 2008 as the economic downturn and credit crunch left fewer sources of financing available for such deals, according to a report. Industry analysts said the decrease in local venture investments, which reversed a steady yearly increase in deal flow since 2004, mirrored a national trend: Turmoil in the financial markets made it difficult to close new deals and had venture capitalists focusing on nurturing companies in the later stages of development, though some start-ups were funded.”
The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article discussing where online business models might go.
In an article on “open source becoming like Microsoft” on CNetNews.com, Matt Asay points out that by building projects that run only with other open-source projects, and are meant to only work with open-source components, open-source developers are “acting like the proprietary ecosystems [they’ve] tried to overcome." Microsoft, on the other hand, is starting to release code under standard open-source licenses like Apache and openly include open-source code in its products like Powerset.
The Mercury News has a good article on how layoffs are affecting H-1B workers.