On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 06:05:56PM -0600, Marsh Ray wrote: > Note that none of this has anything whatsoever to do with "promoting the > progress of science and the useful arts". > > But what's really sad is that this baloney has affected my ability to > sit down and write a computer program that basically does pure math and > give the resulting system away or use it to produce value.
1) I don't want to have to become a patent lawyer to be a programmer. (IANAPL) 2) Since IANAPL, reading a patent can only hurt me, since by reading it I could be found to willfully infringe, and none of my opinions about whether I'm not infringing count. Or so I've heard. 3) This vaguely reminds me of a private sector implementation of key escrow and export control laws. "If cryptography is outlawed, on5dfjd($T#+$J$IURI#QUXuif;rEr3n#" 4) I wonder if the system could somehow be used against itself. The GPL has an interesting "viral" property; you play by its rules, you get to take advantage of the ecosystem. Otherwise you can't. (legally, anyway - in practice nobody seems to sue over it) I wonder if you could do something similar with patents. It'd be a tough sell - companies are still balking at releasing their source code - Android and Mac OS X both strategically avoided GPL code for some critical components - but maybe a big enough patent collection with significant advantages could form a compelling business case for participation in the long run. One could grant royalty-free licensing to open-source projects, and pick your strategy on closed-source ones (license fees to fund the collection, deny outright, or something in between) -- Good code works on most inputs; correct code works on all inputs. My emails do not have attachments; it's a digital signature that your mail program doesn't understand. | http://www.subspacefield.org/~travis/ If you are a spammer, please email [email protected] to get blacklisted.
pgpyFmBpnQu38.pgp
Description: PGP signature
_______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list [email protected] http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
