On Saturday, August 13, 2011 6:09:49 PM UTC+2, Craig Kelley wrote: > > > If your idea is so simple that it only takes a month to reverse- > engineer, then the idea must be somewhat trivial (one-click > shopping). Instead we have companies spending billions on building > patent war chests -- not innovating with the money. > >
Cedric isn't defending the current system; he's trying to argue that we should be looking at reform and not abolishment. This patent war chest business isn't liked by anyone. The more nuanced discussion going on right now (or at least, what I'm advocating here) is that such reform is a pipe dream; it'll never happen - the kinds of messes we see today are inevitable for the software industry. As such, whilst abolishments has its downsides too, its got a lot less of them than the current system (or any hypothetical system with reforms in place). In other words, Cedric's painted picture of "Oh, won't somebody think of the poor would-be startups which will never even get founded because their would-be founders would no longer dare to try it if a big corporation can just push out a cheap ripoff, throw their marketing department at it, and crush them!" doesn't fly for two entirely different reasons: (A) That's not really how it works. If that's how it worked, twitter would be dead, and Google Buzz would be going nuts. No such luck for google. They had to go back to the drawing boards and come up with a superior solution (which I believe google plus is), and that IS catching on. Evidently the techie buying public is a bit more discerning, and bigcorps can't just come up with the better product just by throwing their money around. (B) That really is how it works. Bummer. Life aint fair. Laws exist to redress unfairness but its silly to argue "This part of life isn't fair, that MUST be fixed, so we should keep trying for years and years to come up with different law forms to address it". One must accept that for some things no law can feasibly be written to redress the imbalance. Startups will have to eke out an advantage in some other way. Take your pick, either way the conclusion is: Software patents are bad. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/javaposse/-/AtyOtO3gp0EJ. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
