Tom Brinkman wrote: >On Tuesday 25 December 2001 07:17 pm, Doug Lerner wrote: > >>What do people think about free vs commercial software in general? >>I myself don't object to commercial software. In fact, I work for a >>company that makes very high-quality commercial software with a >>great, loyal customer base. >> >>Surely there is nothing wrong with paying to have software >>supported and updated? >> >>doug >>
Well the analogy of the clay pot may not be good at all. Consider this-- I make a clay pot, and I fire it and I go to a lawyer and show him the product and get him to draft a patent so that no one else can glaze clay pots or decorate them in any way without paying me royalties. I file the patent and use the proceeds from my clay pots to threaten to keep anyone else who fires clay pots in court for years of ruinous spending battling my army of lawyers unless they pay me ransom for protection against lawsuit. This has happened more than once. Long before hyperlinks were a reality, British Telecom patented the idea of them and could make life difficult for all of us. Does your specilaized software use hyperlinks? or perhaps themes? Well the idea of themes belongs to Apple computing... Patented. As a matter of fact, you cannot write software without significant risk of inadvertant infringement. And the current patent laws set up a legal protection racket whereby technology companies trading in intellectual property with a CEO and a couple battalions of lawyers and _no_ programmers make themselves moderately wealthy by extorting license fees for protection from suit. It even gets as subtle as "We hold patent to this technology and your website subscribers might be using graphics in our format created with unlicensed software, but you can buy a license to avoid litigation in the event this does occur for $7.500" The problem does not rest with Intellectual property but with application which has definitely become a reductio ad absurdem. Non-productive drones feast off the efforts of the workers, the software writers, and squelch creativity. This is the reality and it is why anything I write is GPL. Civileme
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