Thank you, you said it better than I could have. Open Source is the way to go!
On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 7:07 AM, Stephen A. Lawrence <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Horace Heffner wrote: >> >> I can't image any decision that could be more damaging to the US software >> industry, especially in the global marketplace. > > NO, Horace, this is GOOD NEWS!! GREAT news! > > Software patents are horrible, and choke innovation. They do *not* help > innovation in any way shape or form. > > It's normal for the guts of innovative for-profit software to be kept > proprietary, and the code can be copyrighted. This has *not* changed. > > Twenty five or thirty years ago, when software innovation was galloping > along (spreadsheets had just been invented, the Xerox Star had sparked the > desktop revolution, the Mac was just coming out), there WERE NO SOFTWARE > PATENTS. Software was considered to be an "algorithm" and as such was > mathematical in its character, and was no more "patentable" than the > quadratic formula. > > Lotus 1-2-3, and, later, Excel, would have been impossible had there been > modern software patents: VisiCalc's interface would have been patented and > Personal Software would have sued the pants off Mitch Kapor and shut down > the whole field, and we'd all still be using VisiCalc. The main innovation > 1-2-3 had was speed, and that would not have gotten them out from under an > electronic spreadsheet patent. But there was no such patent: VisiCalc was > copyrighted but not patented. > > Then shortly after that, the "look and feel" patents were accepted, and huge > amounts of time and effort started going down the rathole of patent fights, > in particular between Microsoft and Apple. Did this improve or increase > innovation on the desktop? Not that I can see!! Quite the contrary; things > have been pretty frozen ever since in the interfaces world, which is where > those patents first "bit". Oh, there have been minor tweaks, and the > underlying software has gotten better incrementally, but the overall "look" > is about the same as it was when it first became possible to patent it. > However, there have, in fact, been really substantial changes in the "open > source" look and feel, where nothing's patented -- the look of an X windows > desktop today is very very different from how it looked a decade or so back. > I'm not sure one can say the same for a Windows desktop -- that still seems > pretty similar, in overall outline, to the way it looked when Windows 95 was > new. > > And then we got the SCO effect. SCO claimed to have a patent on the core > technology of Unix, and started suing companies to make them pay up (SCO was > by that time a company consisting mostly of lawyers, producing nothing but > lawsuits and profits -- zero innovation from _them_!). IBM and Microsoft > accumulated arsenals of software patents; there was a cold war going on > between them in which there was a threat of global meltdown if they started > enforcing their outrageous patents on everything from page faults to sorting > algorithms. > > GIFs were patented; were you aware of that? Rather, the LZW compression > algorithm was patented. It resulted in a lot of awkwardness and wasted time > among people who wanted to avoid infringing the patent. Did any developers > *benefit* from this patent? No, not at all -- it was owned by some large > company (SCO again, maybe? not sure) which was not in the business of > innovating; they were in the business of litigating. > > The attempt to patent the page fault algorithm some time back was the most > horrendous of the patent problems; I'm not sure how that shook out. > > In general, proving "prior art" for software algorithms seems to be > difficult; certainly a lot of the garbage that's been patented was already > developed elsewhere, or was developed near-simultaneously by multiple > individuals at different companies, all basing their work on the same > "ambient" knowledge base. But challenging a patent on those grounds doesn't > seem to work very well, if I can judge by what I could see of the results. > The LZW algorithm, and the consequent GIF patent, are a case in point: LZW > is a minor variation on a common idea in data compression. Certainly, I > recall conversations about the approach of using back-references to do > compression from a time long before the LZW algorithm was published. The > difference is Lempel and Ziv actually published it, and then they -- or more > likely the lab where they worked -- applied for a patent; other folks > working with what amounted to the same algorithm didn't think to do that. > And then the patent ended up in the hands of a bunch of lawyers who treated > it as a cash cow. Just how did that encourage innovation? In a word: It > didn't. > > >> This is something that demands immediate congressional attention: > > God I hope not! > > >> >> http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2008/07/the-death-of-go.html >> >> The loss of the method patent amounts to the loss of thousands of jobs, of >> an entire industry. > > What, they'll have to fire all the lawyers? > > Are we really so scared that Google will get some competition? > > This statement: > > "It will surely be cause for mourning among those who believe that allowing > patents on cutting edge technologies has served the country well for more > than two centuries" > > is B.S. The software patent is a new concept and has benefited a few large > players, like Google, and a whole lot of patent lawyers. > > For centuries we had the notion that you can't patent an algorithm, and that > served us well. The *change* was the inversion of that idea, to allow big > companies to lock out competitors by use of algorithm patents. > > > > >> It turns vast amounts of case law on its head. This is huge, and it >> could impact cold fusion protection as well, when it finally reaches the >> stage of practicality. >> >> Best regards, >> >> Horace Heffner >> http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/ >> >> >> >> > >
