On Wed, 23 May 2012, Matt Giuca <[email protected]> wrote: > To put it another way, if the idea can be quickly conveyed in a meeting > with lawyers, then it is an idea and not an invention and should never > have been patented. Patents are awarded for inventions, not ideas -- > something the system seems to have forgotten.
Sometimes the critical thing is not to have the idea, but to have tested hundreds of ideas and found the one that worked. Consider the NetApp WAFL filesystem and the patent dispute with Sun about ZFS. The concepts of WAFL, ZFS, and BTRFS aren't particularly difficult to understand for anyone who has a good knowledge of computer science. It's easy to have ideas for things that might work, but getting them to work IRL is hard. Presumably NetApp implemented more than a few different data structures for filesystems before coming up with one that works well. The fact that the WAFL design can be quickly described in broad terms to anyone with a good knowledge of CD doesn't make it less of an invention IMHO. There are a lot of really good documentaries about the history of engineering. Pretty much every technological development that they feature is something that was retrospectively obvious once it's been shown to work. But the historical record is of people who devised the inventions often had a lot of trouble getting finance because no-one thought that it would work. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/ _______________________________________________ Free-software-melb mailing list [email protected] http://lists.softwarefreedom.com.au/mailman/listinfo/free-software-melb
