Slashdot Mirror
Software Patents vs. Free Software
Bruce Perens writes: "Did you think you knew what I am doing about software patents from the news coverage? You're probably wrong. Get the real scoop here. There's been enough distortion that I took the time to put down my own opinions, and an explanation of the summit meeting I'm calling on Free Software and The Law. Thanks! - Bruce" You might need to read our previous story about Perens' patent activities for background.
As big a fan of Open Source and Free Software as I am, I don't think that this is the way to go about promoting it or protecting it. Sure we have some kind of implied backing from companies like IBM and HP at the moment, but as Bruce says it's not anything official, and it shouldn't become official.
By making the links between open source and these companies explicit, we are basically putting ourselves into legal obligation with these companies, sacrificing freedom for security. And we all know what our Founding Fathers thought of that idea!
No, the strength of free software is that it is free. By tying it into treaties and contracts with companies we lose the strength which makes it far superior to any closed-source equivalent. We all know corporations aren't to be trusted, and despite their current "nice guy" acts, both IBM and HP have in the past abused their positions within the industry for their own gains.
Free software should remain free. And corporate sympathisers such as Bruce Perens should realise that by playing to the whims of their masters, they risk everything we've gained in the last decade.
Personally I don't completely buy Peren's statement that the net effect of patents held by large companies just cancel each other out. They may happen to cancel each other out, but they also prevent new smaller companies from joining the "big boys", which clearly is also in their benefit. However I do feel, perhaps contraversially, that software patents should exist. What I disagree with is the standard length of patent - it's simply too long for such a fast moving field. (The same applies to many fields, such as genetics.) With a short-term patent, say 3 years at most, people would be able to protect their design (and investment) from others for a short period allowing them to bring to the market a new product. If they fail in that aim then other people should be allowed to take up the challenge, instead of the patent languishing for years to come preventing further work. If we abolish patents completely then many ideas will simply become secret technology; no published articles from commercial orgs. It may also reduce the amount of R&D done in such places, which would be a bad thing.
Ironic to see that one country controls the fundamentals of an invention that wasn't created in that country. Why should the United States have exclusive rights to determine what should and what should not be patented. Example would be the Swede who invented the mouse and never got his patent, nor credit for the invention. Why should he be cheated by a system which cannot govern themselves in a morally ethical fashion, that extends to everyone, free from biases such as the parties bank roll.
Maybe a consortium of international scientists, and engineers should be chosen via methods of voting to serve on an international commitee to promote fair uses of patents in non biased fashions, as opposed to having one central form of governance which does a crappy job allowing monopolizations.
Take notice "securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" now in theory I take this in context to mean that no software in the world should be patented since it took the works of other patented (pre-existing works other than the Author's own) items to create. How does the agency determine that "X Product" from X Foo Company is the genuine inventor of the product without using something that was hidden under the dusty shelves at the patent office.
Is it me seeing this in a different perspective entirely or is this more or less the same arguments coming out of Peren's write up.
What should be done is the loser of the case should have to foot both the lawsuit fees, and legal fees to bring the trial to light. Court cases sure are expensive, and its unfair to both thos plaintiff and defendant to dish out monies for it. Remember a defendant is guilty until proven innocent, and in most cases it would be Davy being sued by Goliath, so since the burden of proof would lay on Goliath's shoulders, they should be the ones to foot the bill for the legal case until the matter is resolved. Afterwards should Davy lose, well then the legal fees would be paid along with whatever else.
Just my two cents on it all.
Want Root?
Bruce is going to be giving the following seminars:
I'm sure amidst all those talks, you could find him meandering about on the ship and corner him for some one-on-one.
No, I don't work for geekcruises.com, I'm just excited to go... :-)
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
From the letter, it sounds like Bruce is arguing this very well. "Hey IBM and HP, you've noticed that OSS is the goose that lays the golden eggs, and you're in the process of stealing a march on your competitors by being the first to make use of this. Well, this nasty software patent thing, as well as having very few net benefits for you people, may soon be used by your competitors to kill that goose. Therefore, you've got a direct and immediate interest in helping to dismantle this system, or protecting the goose from it."
He's showing them why it's in their interests to help us. Thanks a lot Bruce, and keep up the good work!
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
I am not a big fan of requesting things from companies for using open source. Mainly because it seems to set a double standard. Joe user is allowed to use the software free of charge, but once the company uses the software, be it for there own use or in a product they are selling, they have to pay with patents or what not for it? Granted, they should pay for it, but forcing them to do it isn't the best way to go about it. For example, IBM is pushing Linux and paying for it by donating hardware and buying ad space and pushing the idea of free software. Let the company do what they will with the software, as long as they don't violate the license.
In time the company will donate back to the open source world, be it with advertising, hardware, or code, once there business model is based around open source software it is in there best interest to help it along. IBM is going to want to advertise the software they use. And they are going to want to hire programmers to help the project along.
People like the above poster and Bruce Perens make me wonder exactly where the notion of an Open Source Community and the concept of "we" comes up in this discussion. Bruce Perens does not represent the Linux kernel hackers, the Apache Foundation, the *BSD coders nor even the people that hack Slashcode. So on exactly whose behalf is he signing treaties with and who will enforce his end of the bargain?
I've previously told Bruce on kuro5hin that companies have no incentive to give up their IP and in fact will probably lose out on the deal (OpenSSH vs. SSH is a good example) and I'm yet to see a good counter argument for that. Also the fact that he has nothing to back up his threats to them with is also not encouraging. Here's an excerpt my reply to his post on K5 about that.
--
--
Xenu loves you!
A relative of mine has a filtration business. They sell industrial filtration machines that are superior to all others. They patented the machines and the process. They had to hire a few patent lawyers to register the patents oversea as well. My relatives patents are the only thing which defend him from rich, established companies. When they attempt to use his methods, he takes 'em to court. If he didn't, the huge companies would be able to undersell him until he went under. If he didn't patent the method he developed, he would be working for one of the companies, instead of having his own company today. Patents protect the weak as well as the powerful. While my relative could have rolled over and made his patent available to everyone, and not gotten a cent for the years he spent developing his ideas, he prefered to be able to control and develop the idea that he created. If he had not chosen to patent his idea, someone else would have taken the work he did and used it for their own profit. Open source does not cover: food, lodging, computer, utilities, car, entertainment; UNLESS these are shared as well, and not hoarded by a few, then open source is a pipe dream.
In the distance you hear an ominous moo.
The five arguments Bruce puts forward are weak. If he wants to make progress, he will need something stronger. Here are some counter arguments; those who wish to help Bruce may want to find arguments that defeat them. (Note that denial or ranting is not going to give him anything he can take into the meeting.)
constitutionally unjustified: this may be something that you could use in the US legal or political systems, but why should it influence multinational companies? It is not their business to interpret or enforce the US constitution, they just operate within the law as interpreted in the courts.
isn't the computer, not its software, the thing that should have been patented? Why is it wrong to be able to protect a new idea implemented as a pattern of digits, but right to be able to protect a new idea implemented as a pattern of metal or plastic? It is the new idea that is being patented, the preferred embodiment being in software is not the real issue. This is where all the generalised argument against an ill-defined concept of "software patent" will be easiest to take apart.
The 20-year term it may be true that the particular embodiment will be obsolete, but the idea could well still be very valuable. If the idea is not valuable then the patent does not matter because nobody is using the idea, and the holder is paying the patent fees for no benefit. If people still want to use the idea in a new implementation, then it is still valuable and clearly not obsolete.
The monopoly ... anti-trust laws this is much like the constitution issue, this is a matter for the political and legal system, why should the companies be doing anything themselves?
U.S.A. Tax if other countries change their patent laws, then US companies will have to start paying holders of patents in those other countries if they want to use the ideas there. Making the patent law the same everywhere could just as easily reduce the dominance of US-based patent holders.
Remember that "hundreds of anonymous people don't like it" is not much of an argument to take into a meeting with companies that are making a lot of money out of their patent portfolios. Don't just say you think patents are evil, think of some better arguments than the ones Bruce started with.
Actually for the last 8 years IBM has been granted more patents then any other company. Last year it was granted 2800 patents.
IBM got $1.5 billion in profits from licensing patents last year.
So getting IBM to give up patents could be a hard sell.
I wonder if it is possible to "GPL" a patent.
Maybe allow a patent licensed for free as long as the software it is used in meets the free and/or open software definition.
What a relief. We haven't had a patents discussion in almost three days. I was starting to twitch.
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
I think software patents are a bit of a misnomer... algorithm patents would better describe the concept, wether they are implemented in hardware or software is entirely besides the point (and courts will not recognise the difference IMO, because that would make it trivial to avoid any algorithm patent by implementing enough of it in low level configurable hardware).
> multinational companies ... just operate within the law as interpreted in the courts
That and change laws where they can to favour themselves, and buy off state officials where they can to overlook transgressions.
> Making the patent law the same everywhere could just as easily reduce the dominance of US-
Making the rest of the world adopt US laws and atittudes, as usually happens (cf legislation on Illegal drugs or software patents), does nothing to reduce US dominance.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
It seems to me that bruce has more problems with the legal system in general than just the issue of software patents.
Large companies will always do whats in their best intrests regardless of what they say their reasons are. Profits are everything, the advance of the software development is nothing. Big corporations will always go as far as the law allows (sometimes further if they think they can get away with it) to maximise profits. The only way we can change the way they act is to change the system.
And since they control the system I cant see things changing...
My favorite quote is the part about Stallman refusing to allow public access to this "summit". Firstly, who is Perens to summon such a summit, and secondly, who is Stallman to dictate terms? Per the GPL, if you release code and people use it, those users are bound to release code to THEIR users. So if you purport to represent a movement, you'd better let the movement have its voice too.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
If they expect significant revenue then maybe they should get aggressive enough to actually keep up with their marketing claims. I work for an University that owns over hundred HP NetServers. To maximize services while reducing cost, we have installed Linux on a dozen of these NetServers to provide services such as DNS, SMTP relays, Web servers, UseNet, etc. So, we have HP NetServer sales team out to provide us more information on where HP is headed in the future. And during the meeting we bring up Linux. They talk all about how HP is putting it's hardware including server grade hardware and storage area networks through a "certification" process. Supposibly, for a NetServer which has been certified to run Linux, the drivers to take advantage of all marketed features is available. However, they can not name a single model from the HP NetServer line where the HP TopTools or any other Linux health monitoring package works on! The NetServer health monitoring capablity was heavily marketed to us, it just that it can't be taken advantage of when running Linux. And supposibly the HP sales team was going to have a HP tech email me back with how to get TopTools running on the NetServer line. But they haven't.
A couple years ago, I did get a HP tech to write me back about NetServer health monitoring. He stated that NetServers are "IMPI compliant." This is like saying that something is "SMTP compliant." From a hardware driver/support stand-point it is close to useless information. SMTP commonly rides on top of TCP/IP which in turn commonly rides on top of Ethernet. So, if you don't know the Ethernet chipset used on a system, your not going to be doing much SMTP. Likewise, IMPI commonly rides on top of I2C which commonly rides on top of a SMbus. So, if you don't know the SMbus chipset then your not going to be doing much SMTP. Hence, we aren't. No hardware health monitoring at all, just aggressive marketing of hardware features going to waste.
But there is hope! The "aggressive" incorporation of GNU/Linux has lead HP to release TopTools for two Kayak workstation models of XM600 and XU800. If we buy HP workstation hardware instead of server grade hardware, then we can use the agressively marketed hardware health monitoring. In fact, the Linux standard support for health monitoring called "lm_sensors" also works because one of the lm_sensors authors signed a NDA (Non-Discloser Agreement) for supporting the Kayak HP prioritary MaxiLife sensor chipset. But the TopTools when run on HP NetServer line report that "this is not a HP computer or is the wrong model" and lm_sensors do not work either. We are considering other manufactor's in the future that don't use prioritary sensors which require NDAs to use.
We also talked with HP about a HP OpenView solution. They explain how they keep CPU utilization down on the servers that are monitored by looking directly into the kernel structures. This, of course, makes their close source software very kernel version specific. They still have not gotten back to me as to when HP OpenView agents will be usable on Red hat GNU/Linux v7.1 (which use kernel version 2.4 instead of v2.2).
Now, if HP is so agreesive that server grade features such as hardware health monitoring only work on their *workstation* line and HP does not provide responces to Linux hardware/kernel support related questions, why should they expect to get significant revenue? Wouldn't they get more significant revenue if they fully supported Linux on the NetServer line instead of encouraging Linux customers to downgrade to workstation hardware for full support? Wouldn't they get more significant revenue if Linux customers where more confortable with HP by being able to ask questions of the lm_sensors MaxiLife driver author instead of putting him under the cloud of NDA? Wouldn't they get more significant revenue if they actually provided the email responces they promised to Linux customers instead of driving the customers to their compettors to get responces? I guess what I mean to ask is, shouldn't HP reserve their expectation of significant revenue before long for a time when they stop treating Linux customers like shit?
(Sheesh...lost my password again...)
One important claim made in the article is that software patents aren't generally enforceable. While that might be true in theory, I wonder how it actually works out in practice? Consider these 1999 statitics for the U.S. Patent system as a whole:
Average monetary award by a jury in a patent infringement case: $8.6 million
Average monetary award by a judge in a patent infringement case: $9.8 million
Percentage of lawsuits which are settled before trial: 61.5%
Average reported* out-of-court settlement amount: $39.6 million
* Many smaller settlements are not reported.
Patent owner's success at trial: 76.5%
Percentage of patent infringement judgments which are appealed: 51%
Success rate of jury cases after appeal: 61.7%
Success rate of judge-alone cases after appeal: 74.1%
(Source: Patent Enforcement and Royalties Ltd )
The interesting numbers to look at are the success rates of IP owners in successfully getting their patents upheld in court. Now this doesn't break out software patents by themselves, but the overall statistics are pretty much in favor of the IP owner. Food for thought.
Jared
LPI
Still worried about deploying Open Source Software? Consider this: The Ark was built by amateurs; the Titanic by professionals. Which would you have rather been on?
If the patent and copyright system do not have the effect of promoting progress, they aren't constitutional
Isn't that like saying "If the constitution doesn't say that linux is better than windows, then linux is unconstitutional?"
Oracle and unix guy.
Check this license out.
Victor Yodaiken chose to license a patent for use in software released under version 2 of the GNU GPL. The net effect is less freedom than mutual defense or simply publishing the "invention" to serve as prior art.
I respect the contributions of people like Stallman and Perens, but their egos tend to keep me at a distance from their "cause." I like the idea of free software; I release code under the GPL -- but I do not consider Perens and Stallman my "leaders", nor do have I granted them to right to speak for me.
Perens and company preach about noble goals embodied in free software -- yet they only seem to want information to be "free" when they have dictated the terms of that freedom. This closed meeting violates the spirit of free software. I smell hypocrisy in their words...
How much real code have Perens and Stallman contributed to the free world? I look at freshmeat and other repositories, and I see many, many names, from many countries -- yet Perens and Stallman get to decide who gets to speak for all of us, and they couch their cause in terms of a nation that does not encompass us all. Much as I love my country and its Constitution, I am disturbed by the insular attitude of Perens statement.
--
Scott Robert Ladd
Master of Complexity
Destroyer of Order and Chaos
All about me
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
While a number of interesting points are made by the author, he offer no support for any of his assertions, e.g., 95% of software patents are invalid or companies conduct research only to build patent portfolios. Any good argument should have a structure with SUPPORT for each point raised in the argument other then just saying it's so. I'm sure many companies, lawyers, and scientists would argue that they fund and conduct research to make new discoveries. The patent process is used to commercialize these discoveries and prevent others from free riding on their work.
IMHO it's in a software company's best interests to not prosecute open software companies for violating software patents, for two simple reasons:
(1) An open source developer probably doesn't have very deep pockets, so there's nothing worth suing.
(2) Other companies might use that open source for their own projects, and when that happened, they'd be potential targets.
Hmm... I wonder if there's anything in the code Apple subsumed for OSX that's been patented? Or Sony with the Palm emulation software?
Bruce says: "But the best argument for this essay is that software patents block Free Software development."
Except the patent system is already in place and protected by the constitution, so we can immediatly reject this argument.
Bruce claims that if x, y, or z are true then software patents should not be allowed, but he never proves x, y, or z.
Bruce seems to think that patents exclusivly protect large companies. Most really new inventions have happened apart from large companies. And the companies that have the most patents are those that have made innovation their business (bell labs, anyone) and they use the proceeds from those patents to do things like pay the salaries of the guys working there inventing more stuff.
Many new companies appear in established industries and are succesful simpply because they do thing differently. These small companies prosper in a forest of giants only because of patents.
And to the argument I have seen many times that "corporations" have many patents and Free Software has few. Since we all *know* that free software is where all the innovation is happening all you Free Software developers must niot be filling for patents. Why doesn't Bruce do something useful like helping Open Source developers get patents and enforce them instead of encouraging them not to.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
The only thing more annoying than a Libertarian is an (un|mis)informed Libertarian
Let me explain why this is a concern. Suppose Company X makes Product A. Company Y competes with company X by making Product A and also makes Product B, which provides the bulk of its income and finances the development of its competitive Product A. Company X can sabotage Company Y by fostering the development of an open source equivalent of Product B so as to cut off the revenue Company Y needs to compete with it (and, perhaps, to survive). Its "air supply" -- to use the word of Microsoft executive Jim Allchin -- has been cut off.
This isn't an abstract example. In the early days of the Windows environment, Microsoft destroyed Quarterdeck, which made DESQview, by giving away a free knock-off of Quarterdeck's QEMM memory management software (which was used to support its GUI and multitasking development). The result: Quarterdeck, without a "cash cow" equivalent to Microsoft's MS-DOS, could not compete. DESQview -- the best multitasking environment available for PCs at the time -- and DESQview/X -- a brilliant GUI based on X Windows -- died because there was no money for their future development.
While Microsoft's free equivalent didn't happen to be open source, it very easily could have been. (In fact, had Microsoft not been rich enough to bankroll its QEMM equivalent itself, it might have been the only practical way to go.) In any event, it always takes much less effort and money to develop a knock-off than the original, because Quarterdeck blazed the trail by developing the technology and feature set, solving all of the knotty technical problems, and dealing with the tradeoffs that are always inherent in new products.
Richard Stallman and others have specifically touted open source as a way of attacking companies they do not like (which, in the case of RMS, includes any company that publishes commercial software -- even those which, unlike Microsoft, act ethically).
To prevent larger companies from copying their work and wiping them out -- and to prevent open source from being used in a predatory and unfair manner against them -- companies that develop new technology need to patent it. This is precisely what patents are intended to do, and they're especially urgent in an age where open source can be abused to prevent people who honestly advance the state of the art from being rewarded for their labors.
Richard Stallman once told me, personally, that one of his motivations for opposing software patents is that they would make it more difficult for the FSF to "wipe out" (his words) commercial software. Stallman's statement underscores the danger.... And the need for software patents. We might argue about the optimal length of these patents (there are many merits to the argument that 20 years is too long), and that some of them should not have been issued due to obviousness or prior art, but few of us with a sense of justice and fairness would say that open source should be allowed to be used as a weapon in a malicious agenda.
If you've heard Bruce speak, or read his writing, you know that he shares some of RMS's animosity toward commercial software companies and frequently rattles his saber, "demanding" that they forfeit their hard work. Could this be the reason he opposes software patents? Just food for thought.
--Brett Glass
OK, so I agree that perhaps patent laws might use a review. An expiration period of 20 years is probably too long, particularly when it comes to the software field.
But, free means free. If you develop for free, and then start asking for something back from someone who has made money from it, did you really mean free in the first place? That's not free. That's conditional. If you don't like others profiting from your work, don't distribute it freely then. You have the right to provide some sort of licensing mechanism that might say, for example: "Free until you profit from it. Then, you owe me money." Now that phrase was admittedly not very legalese, but you get the point.
I believe that the free software movement exists as a way to counteract heavy money-making machines, and avoid some sort of serious social disbalancing that may come from that. It's nature balancing itself, and that's just great. But if you are not ready to give your work 100% free, then be clear about it.
While it is interesting to think about getting software patents thrown out as being unconstitutional, the reality is that there are large vested interests that want to keep them.
The more important issue is that people who contribute to open source software do not have an umbrella corporation to protect their assets in the event of a patent infringement conflict. Thus, when an individual OSS contributor gets a "cease and desist" letter for patent infringement, there is real motivation for the indiviual contributor to come to terms.
One possibility is to create a corporation in a country outside the United States that "owns" open source softare. The primary purpose such an OSS corporation is to shield the assets of individual OSS contributors. If this OSS corporation is incorporated in a country that does not support software patents, a patent infringement suit gets pretty interesting.
I would think that one should show the source code if one wants a software based business process patent. Nevertheless it doesn't solve the problem by just doing that alone, I believe.
... the whole thing. Where do I miss the logic ? IANAL and IANAP, but this thing fascinates me to understand. Can you help me ?
Patenting the source code directly wouldn't necessary help, as you can write code easily a bit differently to achieve the same result. I thought one patents a "software based business process" or an "idea", not one specific code implementation of that idea. And that's exactly why those patents are damaging to the progress of software development.
How many ways can you code a one-click ordering feature ? The reason why Amazon's one-click patent is damaging, is exactly because it had not patented their own specific code, but the idea of the one-click business process in itself. May be the code they had written to accomplish their one-click feature was mediocre. May be other developers could code the same thing more elegantly, would have added or designed privacy issues related with the one-click ordering feature differently etc.
It's clear to me that the patent not only prevents innovational coding by taking the incentive away from anyone to write better code for the same idea, they also take away any financial incentive for all other coders to further invest their development time into the same or similar solutions for the patented software based business process. On top of that, they prevent competing companies to use business processes, which should be "common good", because they can be "invented" or "coded" in hundreds of ways which are "commonly known".
If a software company owns the copyrights to its own (closed) software, that should be sufficient to regain R&D costs they had to invest into their development team. If a software company wants to patent a software based business method and you would request that they have to show their source code, it would just mean that you patent a specific code implementation of that business method and not the business process itself. The next step would be that each an every code implementation would be patented and this would just then mean the patent and the copyright of that code become one and the same thing. (Right or wrong ?)
People say algorithms are inventions and that you can patent therefore an algorithm. But aren't there always a multitude of possible algorithms to solve a certain problem ? (Right ? Wrong ?)
Why then wouldn't one limit the financial rewards of a software based patent, which allows a company to regain their R&D costs, to the amount of money the company had to spend on its development team to come up with the algorithm ?
An algorithm is purely the result of a thought process. How much does the brainpower of a programmer cost ? Isn't the programmer as much worth as the financial revenues the idea of the software based business process is going to generate for the company ? In other words, if the business "idea" is not that great to begin with, the programmer's work to generate code for that idea, is also not much worth, certainly not "a million or much more".
Most software based business processes patented these days are not as much worth as a twenty year long (or even shorter one) software based patent allows a company to reap profits from.
May be one should think about tieing a software based business process patent to a proof, that said business process in itself generates a meaningful profit to the company, independent from the fees the company can collect from the patent.
In case a company couldn't prove that, it should loose its patent.
If the business process is that banal, that it can't be proven that it is essential to the general business plan of the company to generate revenues (or just for that little time period til someone else would have implemented other code to implement the same business process), then the revenues from the patent shouldn't replace the non existing profits the patented business method was unable to generate.
That certainly was not intended by the people who designed the first patent laws. Clearly it was meant to do the opposite, to regain upfront investment costs to implement an innovative idea, but not to generate profit of a bad idea, which didn't cost much to implement through code to begin with. The "idea", for example, of the "one-click ordering feature" is so banal, that it hardly can be recognized as a "breathtaking invention" for the "Progress of Science and useful Art".
Can Amazon prove hat the one-click feature generates income aside from collecting fees for its patent on it ? I doubt it. Why then is it something worth to be patented, if the software based business process even doesn't help the company's business economically ? Or in other words, does the fact that Barnes & Nobles was not allowed to use the one-click ordering feature (implemented by code their own programmers implemented) had any negative economic impact on the overall business of Barnes & Nobles ? I doubt that too. How ethical then is the whole process of patenting something which is worth nothing and collect fees for someone infringing on something worthless ?
What software based patents do, is not supporting the "Progress of Science and useful Arts", they promote the "Progress of Profit of a single company" by precisley preventing the "Progress of Science and useful Arts" in the *field of software development* to allow to take place. That is clearly not the intention of the constitution. There have to be other methods for a software companies to regain R&D costs into software development than the patenting of a simple software business process.
Now the whole thing becomes completely different if you deal with open source software.
An open source code based software company can't regain its R&D costs through its copyrights on the source code, due to the GPL and similar licences.
But there might be a chance to allow the open source code based software company to still regain R&D costs if you would design a specific open source code based business process patent.
Ironically only for open source code a business process patent makes actually a lot of sense, because it allows to promote "Progress of Science and useful Art" (because of its open sources) and at the same time would allow the open source code software company to be on a level playing field to regain R&D costs.
Strangely enough the open source business process patent (within the realm of software development) is the only one, which actually makes sense in the framework of the original intentions of the patent laws, whereas the closed source business process patent opposes the original intentions of the patent laws.
Therefore it might be very important in order for the open source code and the GPL to survive, to have a specific patent for *open sourced software based business processes*, so that there is a way for the open source based companies to regain their own R&D costs as well as the closed source code software companies did with both their copyrights for their closed source code and their
patents for their closed source software based business methods. Those latter companies have one advantage too many (the business patents), whereas open source code companies have neither.
If both kind of companies were to be put on equal level playing grounds, it would mean that you have to disallow closed source code based business method patents and request open source code based business method patents for all sorts of software copyrights that include the request to free and open sources.
The GPL *clearly promotes* "Progress in Science and useful Art" in the field of software development, but forfeits at the same time the inate financial rewards it would normally hold for anything else *but* open source software. That has to be corrected.
Strange
I was entertained by your reference to my animosity for commercial software companies. I am a member of the top management of HP, a commercial software (and hardware) company with 84,000 employees. HP asked me to come on board to help them be a good partner with the Free Software community, not so that I could "rattle my saber at them". Being a partner means you give some, and you take some. That's quid-pro-quo is what I'm talking about in the essay.
Regarding the use of Free Software "as a weapon", I think the word you are searching for is "competition". Software patents improperly and unfairly block competition.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
I can call a summit, and folks will show up. Someone had to call the meeting, it's too important to simply not do anything about the situation. I am the one who made the decision to close it, as the kernel summit was closed, and that's GPL stuff too. I used RMS' logic for justification, but I made the decision because I did not see us getting an agreement any other way.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
I wrote
The word only does not appear in that sentence and the reason given is not meant to be exclusive.If this were a school paper or one I was writing to submit to a research journal, it would have lots of footnotes. But it's neither. It's political writing.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
For example, if someone had a patent for item A, within 10 years they'd have to patent another item B to keep A active, and within five more years a third item C to keep A active, and within five more years items D and E for A and B respectively. Failure to successfully provide another IP submission would cause a registered IP item of their choice to expire; noncommunication would default to their oldest registration.
On various Slashdot postings I've seen comments requiring more money for keeping registrations alive, but something like the above would be much easier on the FSF. And it would be more sensible for AbandonWare.
Copyrights, Patents, Trademarks: temporary loans from the Public Domain, not real property ("intellectual" or otherwise)
>and I'm yet to see a
should be:
and I've yet to see a
*wakes up*
Doh! Wrong forum! I thought Kuro5hin seemed a bit lacking today...
Everytime you look at porn a devil gets their horns.
Your "quid pro quo" is not a fair exchange; it is blackmail -- similar to an old fashioned "protection racket." Perhaps it would be a good idea to publish a transcript of your speech so that people can understand this.
--Brett Glass
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
--Brett