I'm a day late and a dollar short to this discussion, but I agree with the final paragraph here. And in fact, patents are designed to be just that tool. A patent is designed to encourage companies to release trade secrets to the public in exchange for a guaranteed monopoly for some set amount of time. The question is whether software patents cause more harm than good (and they do indeed bring some benefits).
--- Puryear Information Technology, LLC Baton Rouge, LA * 225-706-8414 http://www.puryear-it.com Author of "Best Practices for Managing Linux and UNIX Servers" Download your free copy: http://www.puryear-it.com/bestpractices.htm ----- Original Message ----- From: "Justin Trobec" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <General at brlug.net> Sent: Friday, September 23, 2005 11:34 PM Subject: Re: [brlug-general] to release or not to release,intellectual retentiveness. I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but I have to disagree with this: On 9/23/05, Will Hill <williamhill2 at cox.net> wrote: > The same way lawyers, doctors, engineers and just about everyone else > earns a > living. They master a body of public knowledge and apply it skillfully. > Would you trust a lawyer who would not let you see briefs submitted on > your > behalf? A doctor who would not let anyone see his office or tell you what > medicine you are taking? What would you think of a doctor that discovered > a > new treatment and then kept it secret? Most people are still outraged by > behavior like that. This is a weak, weak analogy. If one person could go to a doctor, and then tell all of their friends what treatment they had so that all their friends could independently use said treatment without the aid of a doctor, then you'd have something. Same deal with a lawyer...if I could get a lawyer to draw up a contract, and then all of my friends could use that same contract without any further work forever and always, then yeah... But it's not that way. There's liscensure for the doctors, and bar exams for the lawyers. Those groups of professionals have some form of protection that says only they can do what they do...developers have no such protection. In many cases, once a product hits the market, other people can take it and reuse it independently of any interaction with a developer. In fact, if the developer's done their job well, then the code will be well generalized and consequently much easier to reuse. Software solutions are general...medical and legal solutions are not. So, developers and the people that manage and employ developers have to take steps to ensure that their business is profitable...there are lots of different business models, and I won't pretend that I know which is better. I love tech, not business. I do think, though, to be fair to the "intellectually retentive" in the tech-industry that if you got rid of medical liscensure, hospitals and other institutions would be pressured to go to similar lengths to protect their technology. I think that my ideas are my property, for as long as I can keep them to myself. If my ideas were to die with me, then they'd forever be my ideas. The trick is not to do away with intellectual property, but to make sharing it more attractive. _______________________________________________ General mailing list General at brlug.net http://brlug.net/mailman/listinfo/general_brlug.net
