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NewsForge On U.S. Advice To EU On Software Patents
An anonymous reader points to Roblimo's "interesting article about how the U.S. sold out to software patents and the EU should as well." Should be of interest to Europeans, forced as they are "to suffer from willy-nilly software development by individuals who have not been screened, approved, and trained by corporate human resources professionals."
We have the elections for the European parliament coming up this weekend..
Are there any slashdotters here that let their vote be influenced by this, and if so how ?
It's a shame to see that this is almost definitely going to happen. With the abundance of bogus patents already granted in the US, it's only a matter of time before people start seeing obvious and old ideas being patented by corporations that exist solely to sue others into submission and profit from the legal entanglements while the lawyers are busy sorting everything out. I can't believe that Europeans would be so dumb as to bring this upon themselves, and can only conclude that the US is strongly pressuring them to come around to their point of view vis-a-vis intellectual "property".
Who's in the US pressuring Europe into this, why are they doing this, and how can we stop them?
Don't forget that already over 30000 (unofficial and not enforcable) software patents granted in the EU. Just imagine those poor corporations. They spent a lot of money on researching and filing out-of-law patents, all for nothing! Any sensible politician would say yes for the software patents I guess.
And that is to get the government and private industry so hooked on open source software that software patents would wreck the economy. The fastest way for the public to begin to realize that this is a terrible legal system is to make it hit home.
But then open source developers often just don't get it either. OpenOffice for example doesn't even have a word count feature nor the ability to print multiple slides on the same page. These are two features that are absolutely critical in an academic environment for students. With academia firmly against proprietary software giants, we can use universities as a weapon against them.
We really need for a group like Knoppix to make a LiveCD with the ability to do a very clean, intelligent install to the hard drive. LiveCDs are the way to go for installations. The user can play around with them all they want and then ideally, just run an installer to copy it to the hard drive and configure the bootloader.
Right now we have about 1.5-2 years before the next version of Windows comes out. Now is the time for the major projects to conduct user surveys to find out what is missing, add the features and get the product out the door. The fastest way to take down Microsoft, the biggest threat on patents, is to make them stop growing their profits. Since the company makes a lot of its payments from stock, if we can stop them from growing, maybe even cause them to actually have slight negative growth, it would unbalance their payment system which would cause them to have to burn through more cash.
And as an aside, ironically to those who are thinking G-ddamn he is a socialist.... I'm voting libertarian in 2004.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
to suffer from willy-nilly software development by individuals who have not been screened, approved, and trained by corporate human resources professionals.
as far as I can tell, those are roblimo's words, not the words of any proposed legislation. Seems inflamatory to me (as evidenced the reaction you and I share) and smells like sensational journalism. I'd love to see a link to this in an actual proposal* or get some more info on it.
(*actually, I wouldn't like to see it in the proposal, but I would like to know if the article's claim is a fair representation of a proposed idea)
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
In France, politicians say: we will lower taxes and unemployment. Average Joe say: shut up, I wanna watch TV.
And no one knows what a 'pay tent' is!?! This whole patent story has no connection to everyday life, and no one seems to understand or even care about the problems that could come from it.
But the Irish people are pretty amazingly ungovernable, even by Irish people. If the patent situation gets too bad, there will be an "adjustment".
Your point is good, but unfortunately the broadness of most software patents means that if there is an OSS 'alternative' to a proprietary program, it will probably infringe on that patent and risk being crushed by a team of elite ninja lawyers.
I designed one of the problem sets (homework assignments) for the intro CS course at Princeton University. The assignment is a digital signal processing one where you animate waveforms from an mp3, generate your own sound waves, and add a basic filter to a sound wave. All the sound stuff including decoding the mp3 file is done for you, you just have to manipulate the data. The assignment was intended to teach the use of objects in Java (we had students create a Wave class that had some built in capabilities to add two sound waves together, amplify/attenuate sound waves, and generate waves of a given amplitude frequency - musical notes are characterized by their frequency), and make them deal w/ arrays. FYI, here is the assignment. N.B: I'm sure I screwed up some technical sound details in there
Point of the post: I got responses ranging from I hate it to this assignment made me want to be a CS major. The people who were interested in CS/math/sciences loved it because they got to do something fun fairly simply. Those who were taking the course to fulfill a requirement or to dabble in programming hated it because it required them to deal w/ creating their own class and some math (fill an array with samples of a sin wave) and other stuff that required some thought/learning. They much preferred the assignments I hated that involved no creativity/original thought and were rather boilerplate. A lot of people (even really smart people) don't like being forced to think and much prefer memorization to critical thinking/problem solving. That's why, IMHO, many programs don't teach concepts (it disgusts me that in engineering classes the profs are "afraid" to give mathematical proofs for things b/c so many students hate them) or foundation - because too many people hate it and shy away from courses that focus on things that can't be crammed for and require understanding.
For that matter, if the EU was to adopt software patents, what % of those patents would be American?
About 65%... I don't really need to comment beyond that, but let me just say it sickens me how willing my "fellow europeans" are to sell me down the river.
I find your comments interesting. I've been developing data acquisition and process control software for twenty-five years in a number of fields and industries, and never was able to land a job by going through Human Resources, or "Personnel" as they used to call it. I'm unfortunately a square peg, as far as HR is concerned. Lots of experience but no degree, and as I was an independent developer for 18 years I had no convenient "salary history" to show. My current full-time position I got because the director of software engineering did all the interviewing himself, not trusting anyone else to make such an important decision, and was more concerned about my accomplishments and my technical capabilities than my grip. Too bad more managers aren't like him.
I agree with you about the monkey and the football.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The weirdest, nevertheless one true thing about the software industry, is the sheer number of stupid people in it. My personal reasoning for such a situation where a vast number of untalented rub shoulders and harass the small number of very talented (it's called Pareto principle) is in the nature of software itself. Software amplifies the speed of any process many fold that users of it do not notice the inefficiencies. Stupid people survive because the silly trash they produce is still somewhat useful for the clients. Clients tend to overlook the abysmal quality of software due to the new found efficiency in their business.
Science as a way of life.
that there is a firm and long-term strategy in place by certain groups to find ways of outlawing the act of writing code for public consumption without a license. the end goal being simply to create or perpetuate existing monopolies by the creation of artificial barriers to entry into what has become an incredibly open market.
i think the first real attempt (or mockup) was certification of code which found its extreme in palladium. This principally technical solution has since been abandoned.
the current wave is based around so-called intellectual property rights. the term is a joke, but has many proponents, from the media industries through to the software business. you do not own that idea, it belongs to someone already. the space in your head has a 75-year lease.
this will also fail imho. it is - like palladium - too ludicrous a proposition and fails the basic darwin test: any society that allows its common technological culture to be partitioned into 'property' will suffer competitive disadvantage and eventually either change or die.
i expect the next phases to be based on security, but only after the current market leader is long dead and gone, its laughably insecure products being replaced with "professional" ones from other, older players.
who will, i think, be in the fore-front of the lobby to license software programming.
i've been programming for 20 years but i am very sure that my children will not be allowed to do this freely, any more than i can distill liquor and sell it to my neighbours.
software is just too fundamental, too valuable to be left in the hands of the common people.
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If everybody in the world lines up with the US system, in the end only Microsoft and IBM will be legally able to write code.
Maybe the solution is for all the open source programmers to form some sort of guild and patent every damn stray thought like the big boys are doing. That way we'll have leverage if they threaten us. We can even set up do-nothing companies to sue Microsoft for patent infringement every time they fund an SCO or AdTI, you know, like whacking your dog with a rolled-up newspaper. Baaaaad Microsoft. Whack!
Right now, they're trying to justify patents in the EU because of the great economic prosperity in the US. Unfortunately, it's not the first time those in the US has used this kind of argument...
To paraphrase "look at the great wealth and prosperity of the plantation system, the grand architecture, the vast and rich land, the free markets ... they paid for those slaves God blessed, surely that alone shows slavery is good, and the negros have been saved from their barbaric condition" ....
I wish I could say that patents are causing less harm, but when they recently lokcked out 10's of millions of Africans dying of AIDS from getting generics because "they had no incentive", because patents are "a property right", becasue "the wealth of the pharmasutical industry in the US is proof that patents work" ... etc. - it really causes me to think twice.
The people who know understand that the USA works because of freedom that exists inspite of patents, not becaus of them.
I'm confused. Doesn't one have to show "how" the thing to be patented does what it does? I heard through the rumor mill that Coca-Cola won't patent it's formula because then others will now know how to copy it.
So if this is true (and it might be wrong, that's why I am asking) wouldn't a closed source company patenting something then make it's source open for all to see and look at?
Correct - explain - enlighten me, please.
Xerox could have sat on the idea, but sued Apple, Microsoft, and anybody else who came along with a use, into smouldering red-ink ruin.
The patent would have finally expired sometime around the early- to mid-90's.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
suffer from willy-nilly software development by individuals who have not been screened, approved, and trained by corporate human resources professionals
I work for Siemens. A rather huge multinational based in Germany. That's Germany as in "right there in the middle of Europe". Maybe the neo-anarchist software developers of Antwerp and Barcelona are a different story, but the software developers from Germany are the epitome of "screened, approved and trained" mobile resources.
Tell a German that product is more important than process, and they'll call the men in the white suits to haul you away! To them, process is the product, and what you sell to generate revenue is merely icing on the cake.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
To be fair to the HR people themselves, they are particularly stressed from compression between these forces:
1. People seeking work and willing to lie, cheat and steal to get it.
2. Internal policies that are frankly illegal, if not outrightly immoral.
We ask (or demand) that HR vet the population which has members representing force#1. That alone is quite stressful, and with all the law governing the selection process, we arrive at force#2. Let's face facts; managers don't willingly do things like hire 1 women into a group of loudmouthed guys, and vice versa. (If you don't think it works in the reverse, guys, just try to get a job in a library, bookstore, etc. Odds are you'll encounter resistance to the undercurrent of "women only".) Managers of all types have all manner of biases and states of ignorance, and gender, race, marital status, etc. all come into play without prompting.
When it comes to workplace biases, about the only ways the government catches all this prejudice is (1) the company is small enough that they screw up and let a bias become readily apparent, or (2) the company is large enough that statistical methods can show a likely pattern of bias. Between these two conditions of exposure, we have a vast range of law breaking.
I've done it myself. I worked for a plating company that made it quite clear that, in general, women and blacks were not welcome. The women were seen as potential lawsuits in general ("you hire 'em and they start filing suits, so forget it"), and specifically for their reaction to the usual array of porn that tends to lay around such a facility. The blacks were not welcome since the good 'ol boys working the lines were profoundly racist; hence, who really wants to invoke strife in the production lines?
(I never want to get involved in such a small, inbred business again. I want to avoid feelign dirty in that particular way that washing cannot alleviate.)
I am very skeptical about the (you'll note, primarily female) HR population. But I have to hand them the (small) olive branch of peace and understanding with the pressures they endure.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
Patent1
Canadian Patent Search
So sorry, Canada has software patents...