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On Software Patent Lawsuits Against OSS
Bruce Perens writes "We've warned you for a decade. Now the monster has finally arrived: patent holders are filing suit against OSS developers." From the article: "We should not be confident that we will continue to have the right to use and develop Open Source software. A coordinated patent attack by a few companies, or even one large company, could completely destroy Open Source in the United States and cripple it in other nations. Funds and patent portfolios that have been established to help defend Open Source would not be sufficient to defend it. Only legislative changes to the patent system can fully protect Open Source and maintain it as a viable source of innovation for our future."
Like, from fear of being sued, you mean?
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
"The only thing that can destroy Open Source is if people stop writing Open Source Software."
That's what Perens is talking about here -- the threat of a patent lawsuit could stop the motor of the movement. That threat is escalating!
Stay tuned...
"Only legislative changes to the patent system can fully protect Open Source and maintain it as a viable source of innovation for our future." Legislative changes to the patent system are needed to protect innovation not just the Open Source community. How can anyone continue to innovate if they have to wade through an endless array of patents just to see if their idea isn't covered by some ridiculous patent.
[an error occurred while processing this sig]
"Which they will if they get sued into oblivion."
That'll work just about as good as taking down all of the file sharers in the world. All of the popular OS software will turn into ghostwrite OS software with anonymous dropboxes in countries without absurd patent laws.
Beat that, they'll move to encryption. The company's can't win, and most of the patents are overtly obvious anyways and should be thrown out. If anything, Open Source will likely cause a patent revolution for that reason alone (just as downloaded music is changing the face of copyright as we know it).
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
So let me get this straight: if we make the government (who you say is backing large companies in "enforcing" IP) get out of the way so that the large companies are unfettered to do so themselves... what's different? Open Source still gets crushed. OK, so it's a different lawyer at the controls.
Granted, the whole mess isn't taxpayer funded anymore. But innovation still dies, and we aren't going to be getting a tax rebate anytime soon. The government will just put their money elsewhere (such as, foe example, picking up the tab at strip clubs for victims of natural disasters).
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
Agreed. Most OSS software is so entrenched, so much a part of the current workings of the Internet, that to try and sue it away is a futile gesture at best. What corporation wants to take the brunt of the backlash when they successfully sue an OSS provider, forcing them to remove their software, only to have some major Net functiionality suddenly become unavailable? In this day and age, publicity is more important than product (think Arthur Andersen) and no company wants to be thought of us as the bully that deprived Internet users of something they coveted, especially if it drives them away from their product/service.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
The important thing about 'software' is 'can you service it'.
I can't service proprietary software. I can service free software. If you prevent me from using free software I will have to go back to pencil and paper.
It'll work quite well. Much OSS development is done commercially -- less frequently as part of a company founded around supporting a piece of OSS, and more frequently as a part of operating a company which is building its underlying infrastructure on OSS components. If OSS is heavily encumbered with patents, then that corporate use (and corresponding support) will disappear. Sure, some OSS will still exist -- but if it's only a spare-time activity, rather than something one can spend 8 hours a day on, that provides far less time for it to flourish; this is particularly true as developers get older and have a wider array of outside responsibilities.
I've been doing work on open source software on behalf of my employers for the entire duration of my employment history. Work will become much less fun and much more work should that go away.
Most people will not bother writing ghostcode. I hate to admit it, but I would not write any more OS code if I knew I could easily get sued for it. There would still be a movement, but the status quo of OSS is not a bunch of teens in their basements writing code all night. It has grown to include large companies and very professional white collar programmers in addition to freelance individuals writing in their spare time (like me). The file sharing movement, on the other hand, is very different.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
Maybe this is a good time to move projects from bloated Sourceforge to Berlios (in Germany).
Just saying.
All of the Open Source software will be written outside of the US where US patent law doesn't hold. And as Open Source people aren't SELLING the software into the US its going to be tough to sue them.
This would of course be bad news until we think that Linus and Alan Cox aren't from the US anyway and Open Source is really taking off in European Govs.
Come on folks, move to Europe, claim political asylum.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
I'm NOT advocating this, but I'm curious: just what does it take to get people to revolt?
I hear story after story about Americans losing, or put at risk of losing, their freedoms. Freedom to create (stifled by patents, copyright, trademark). Freedom from federal income tax (which is alleged to never have been legislated). Freedom from unreasonable search (illegal NSA wiretaps). Gerrymandering and political lobbying that reduce the voting power regular citizens. Etc.
Do we just grumble about these things and suck it up? Are we suffering from how-to-boil-a-frog syndrom, as the majority of German citizens did when the Nazi party seized power before WW2?
Don't get me wrong - I am *not* advocating violence or illegal activity. But I am curious about why peope haven't gotten pissed-off enough to revolt.
This is unfortunate for the US. If the US doesn't do something about their patent system, it is very likely that they will fall behind China and India in terms of innovation. It's not efficient for a company to have to hire a team of lawyers to defend themselves against companies looking to make a quick buck via the patent system. The resources are better spent on research and development, where the US has been a leader in for a long time.
Red Hat should pursue the judgde to conduct a simple test of obviousness of the patent:
Invite a bunch of new comsci grads who are unfamiliar with the patent and ask them to solve the specific problem in hand: mapping relational data to objects and see what they come up with. I am certain that most of them will have some sort of an automated object mapper.
I have 'invented' this technique a few times over the course of my working life in different projects. 10 years ago, 7 years ago, 4.5 years ago, each time for a different platform and each time it was fully automated (the last one was called a Persistance Facade, it was a Java implementation with objects being populated by reflection from database and database being populated from objects, everything was done automagically with an XML file that drove the conversion, and this XML file could also be generated automagically either from the DB or from the objects.)
It is just a ridiculously obvious idea and anyone familiar with basics of programming (not even necessarily OO, flat structures can be populated the same way and I had to do that 10 years ago in C,) and databases should be able to come up with some sort of a workable solution in quite a short time period.
I bet 99.99% of all patents are just as obvious for the people trained in the field in question.
You can't handle the truth.
-Software Patents will make it impossible to create a non-infringing application unless you are as big as MS or IBM.
-Patent litigation will become part of the development process.
-Overseas competition will be able to release their version much sooner because they don't bother playing the SW patent game.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
I don't know. How many entertainment industry groups would be interested in suing 12 yearl old girls living in the projects?
"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under." - H.L. Mencken
If anything, Open Source will likely cause a patent revolution for that reason alone (just as downloaded music is changing the face of copyright as we know it).
You mean the copyright laws which are becoming more and more draconian?
This really seems to me to be the core of what's wrong with US (and soon, possibly EU, according to the article) IP law.
If it is a technical invention - a new technology - then you file a patent. That way you can profit from your innovation.
If it is something creative - something that anybody could have done, but you did it in your particular way and thus created something unique - then you are protected by copyright and thus are legally identified as the creative source, so you can be credited for your creativity.
Software falls between the cracks of the law, and so is protected by both. You have a category of products that you can't mimic without paying for it and that you can't replicate period. As far as I can see, this is only an issue because that which is protected by copyright - information - is now completely free to reproduce thanks to technology.
So, the whole problem boils down to exactly the same thing as music and DRM. It's just that the litigiousness of the US has brought it rapidly to a financial and legal head there. The only way it can be resolved while maintaining society's appetite for innovation is to come up with a new way of classifying the rights of the originator of information - be it technical or creative.
I am not the person to come up with that solution, but I do wish people would stop banging on about the brush-fire conflicts and start trying to figure out a solution to the cause of the problem.
Meta will eat itself
I seriously doubt someone would give up their life in the US just so they can write OSS. What's more likely is that the contributors to an OSS project will be "Anonymous", in the sense that the identity of the contributors cannot be traced to a Country. Couple that with moving the OSS source to a non-US location, and it will make it incredibly tough to for US companies to sue OSS.
That'll work just about as good as taking down all of the file sharers in the world. All of the popular OS software will turn into ghostwrite OS software with anonymous dropboxes in countries without absurd patent laws.
Ok, sure, you're right. So OSS software ends up achieving the same lofty status as Kaza. I'm sure my company will jump right on the OSS bandwagon if that's the case. I'm sure OSS will have no problem attracting the best and brightest programers once they realize they get to be genuine lawbreakers.
Viva la Open Source! Long live the revolution!
Personally, I'd rather we, as a society, took the steps necessary to keep OSS from being marginalized and going underground in the first place.
TW
Some companies create software that they want to patent, but many more companies are starting to actually *use* FOSS.
Apache, Python, Perl, Samba, etc. Public institutions as are becoming increasingly dependent on FOSS as well: computer science / physics departments use Linux. City governments are playing around with OpenOffice.org and Linux. Even various military systems are now based on a complete FOSS stack: Linux, GCC, etc.
So here's my hope: the politically influential organizations that *use* FOSS will out-muscle the Microsofts and IBMs of the world who advocate for software patents. And when a showdown occurs, software patents will go away.
Another possibility is that India and China will start producing far more softare patents than the US does. I think we'd see the U.S. government take a far weaker stance regarding international IP treaties.
I can see two problems with this idea:
1) If a piece of software is developed anonymously then how can you be sure that someone didn't come along and copy code into it from a piece of proprietary software? Some nefarious individual could (anonymously and secretly) copy their code into a piece of open source software with the express intention of then suing users of that software in the future for copyright infringement.
2) Even though the code is developed anonymously, how does that protect me, as the user of that software, from being sued for patent infringement? Again, a patent holder could secretly add features to a piece of software and then sue users of the software for infringing their patents.
I think that we need more transparency in software development, not more secrecy.
What if an OSS project comes up with a technique or technology first? What if an OSS project comes up with an idea, but never pursues a patent; then a company comes along later and attempts to patents the same idea not knowing the OSS project got there first?
When the company attempts to assert patent rights over the OSS project, can the OSS project invalidate the patent by proving they came up with the idea first?
You can toss a big boulder into the path of a river and -- guess what -- the river doesn't stop. It routes around the problem. That is what open source projects will do. Patent suit says stop using method X, well we just invent method Y to do the same thing without infringing the patent. Project goes ahead. You cannot stop this with patent suits.
In fact, this is not endemic to open source; it happens in all areas. If you block something with a patent that people want bad enough, they will route around it, whether legally or illegally (c.f. the motion picture industry). This often leads to quality patented inventions falling into disuse because the patentholder is a bully. Something else is quickly invented to fill the same market niche and well all go happily on our way.
Now of course the trick is that rational settlements may not be possible, e.g., ACME Patent Troll Co. sues Poor Developer Harold for $1 billion in damages and won't settle for his ceasing to use the method. Even if it turns out favorably for PDH, he could be bankrupted by the proceedings. That is what we need legislation about -- the bullying of persons and families by giant corporations with near-infinite legal funds, where the cost of defending against their allegations by itself is a de facto award of damages: trial and conviction without due process.
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
Because some people want some g-damn credit for their work. Spending umpteen hours of off-work time creating a piece of software (or contributing to) for the better of all that choose to freely use said software deserves some accolades.
Why do you think that virus writers get caught? Usually it's their own hubris and desire for credit that outs them in the end.
And OSS writers SHOULD get credit, with big, fat, annoyingly large banners for their contributions. Patents forcing them underground would be a shame.
Excuse my speling.
Making The Bar Project
You're absolutely wrong, and clearly didn't read the article:
It seems very much like a hobbyist who's sharing his code with the rest of the world is being royally fucked by some vested commercial interest. Much like any other OS project could be. Wanna run the risk writing code that somebody making money off the same thing will get pissed off and decide to sue you personally for millions of dollars because you're fucking with their business model? No?
It doesn't matter that we're all criminals already for other things anyway -- that's part of a greater problem in our government and not related to the problem at hand. This is something that should have been nipped in the bud, as Perens says, a decade ago.
C
The Sun is proof that we can't even do fire properly.
OSS will continue unhampered in Europe where software cannot be patented.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4274811.stm
Most of the world does not recognise software patents and this could end up as a wake up call for the gov. as work starts to leave the US. They may finally realise that this is a bad thing for the US. In the short term this will be a bad thing for OSS as it will lose a lot of contributors but in the long term it could be a good thing for the US if the rest of the world moves on and gov. realise that the US is simply being left behind.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
2) There are no new ideas.
There aren't. Not right now anyway. Everyone is too busy patenting "OMG I can take Excel and Access and use them together! Patent! Patent! OMGLOLOLOLOL!"
Until we stop establishing monopolies to people who take existing ideas and add "... on the intarwebz!" to them, there will be no new ideas. The people who can't think of new things will continue to muddy the waters with patents on things that have already been done before, while the people who can will be busy just trying to not be sued out of oblivion by the nutcase who patented "ZOMG if I have table bob with column foo, I can make an object 'bob' and give it a member 'foo' so I can use bob.foo to refer to the data! This is totally unheard of!"
This is unfortunate for the US. If the US doesn't do something about their patent system, it is very likely that they will fall behind China and India in terms of innovation.
But the U.S. is doing something about it. They're pressuring China and India to adopt US-style IP laws.
The problem is deeper than that. What is taken away here is a liberty so obvious that noone has ever though of writing it down: The liberty to do anything with the result of a natural process - thinking. You are not allowed to use an idea that someone has patented. But how can you know? Everyone that has an idea should go to the patent office and look for a similar idea to see if (s)he could do anything with it?
Pathetically ridiculous, I know, and yet, that's the way it is today. How can one defend such a horrendously biaised set of laws is still a mystery to me.
As far as suing is concerned, plenty of **AA consortiums have already answered that question.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
OSS software is like the water that's seeped into the rock. (The rock being the IT and software developemnt world.)
Freeze the water, shatter the rock.
You're omitting a huge step between having the idea and delivering a product - there's the whole process of specifying requirements, designing the product in detail (thousands of decisions, not just the part covered by a patent), developing it, debugging it, testing it, writing documentation, training support people, training pre-sales and sales people (if needed), etc.... All of this takes a huge investment, resulting in the core deliverables (software and documentation) being protected by *Copyright*.
Software patents are really only useful to act as a roadblock to other companies, and in particular for patent trolls - they don't stop a truly motivated competitor from replicating your software product in a cleanroom environment, as long as they can code around the patents, which should virtually always be possible.
"Making money off the finished work" in this scenario would imply taking the copyrighted software and illegally selling it - copyright protection is more than enough to stop this. Patent protection is simply unnecessary for a thriving software business, as long as it is reasonably diligent in its use of copyright and trade secret protection.
The title is misleading, the fact is that viable software development activities for any company or individual who dont have millions in the bank or a big patent portfolio to counter-intimidate with, open or closed source, are under attack by holders of software patents that cover obvious or fundamental operations. Yesterdays software innovations are todays status quo practices, citing the object relational bullshit in the article as a perfect example - that is if you believe there isnt prior art in the first place. Perhaps we should make the patent officers liable for damage caused by stupid patent approval, i bet theyd get thier shit together then.
I was crazy back when being crazy really meant something. (Charles Manson)
I do not think it means what you think it means.
/. crowd to grasp, but perhaps this example will help:
There's prior art--big whoop. That, and five bucks, will get you a cup of coffee at Starbucks.
Prior art isn't some silver bullet that will lay waste to any patent. Prior art is just that: any work existing prior to the work included in the patent relating to the art of the work included in the patent.
The existence of prior art does not automatically invalidate the patent. I don't think I'm going too far out on a limb to say, if it is not the case that all patents include prior art, then it certainly true of 99%+.
For example, I've invented an internal combustion engine which utilizes an innovative, non-obvious process to enable me to build a car which gets 100 miles to a gallon of extra virgin olive oil. However my process only works with oil produced by a specific method. In fact, it only works with oil from a special method that has been patented.
That special, patented olive-oil-producing method is prior art for my invention and would be included in my patent application, but has no bearing on whether my work is patent-worthy or not.
And let's say the implementation of my new engine is in a car with a specific type of existing transmission. That also would be prior art. And that also would have no bearing on the validity of any patent granted for my work.
I don't know why the concept of prior art is so hard for the
Is every computer program the intellectual property of the creator of the language used to write the program? You can't write the program without the language--it's prior art. If you were documenting a program, you'd certainly include some reference to the programming language used--it's prior art.
But you could certainly devise some innovative, non-obvious implementation of that language that would allow you to say, "this is my program."
In the course of human history, the people who have risen to power and want the government to be active in public life are almost always greedy, power-hungry, very easily corrupted people. I'm sick of the idealists who believe that we're going to change that. If you can't change basic facts about social organization, including the propensity to corruption in government and law, in the past 5,000 years, you can't change it in the next 5,000 years.
Abolish every aspect of law and government that isn't strictly needed to keep people from killing each other or others from invading if you want a government that might actually be run by people who will say to Microsoft, Apple, IBM, etc. "not my job to promote your business." The very reason that we have fights over things like software patents is that the federal government got so powerful that there was major influence to peddle. Get rid of the power, you get rid of a significant avenue by which corporations can legally shaft you.
Corporations are created by law. We could easily get rid of corporate abuse of power by getting rid of the laws that create corporations. The resulting depression should be enough to explain why laws were passed to create corporations.
The only way found in the long sad course of human history of limiting the damage from greedy, power-hungry and corrupt people is to spread power out, to limit it. Now if we the people decided to restrict government as you propose, but leave corporate power alone, then the center of power would shift to corporate hands. Power-hungry, greedy and easily corruptible would seek corporate office as they do today. Or did you notice the stock option backdating? What would limit their power? Not fair competition, as that is currently enforced by anti trust law. Not accounting standards, as these are also currently enforced by law. What would set the limits of corporate power if not government?
There are many examples of "natural monopoly". The oldest is irrigation water. The owner of a natural monopoly has power by right of ownership of the monopoly. Question to libertarians: how can the power of natural monopolies be limited?
And think about this: Suppose you went into a time warp and found out that 100 years from now the governments of the world were limited what was "strictly needed to keep people from killing each other or others from invading", but that MegaSoftXP owned the Internet, world wide. To connect to the Internet you needed to buy a computer with a HexiumXP processor running Doors4XP, all MegaSoftXP products. MegaSoftXP selected judges, required that governments pass specific laws, owned most real estate, electric power, water, railroads, roads, buildings, houses, farms, mines, airlines, and controlled most media other than a crazy guy trying to pass out papers on the street corner until MegaSoftXP security arrested him for trespassing and littering. Governments might be limited, but MegaSoftXP isn't. Compete with MegaSoftXP? Exactly how?
--- sig? what is a sig? --
In a free market, supply and demand set the rules and the prices. Competing manufacturers create goods, and customers decide based on quality, price and personal preference. That system worked for decades. Maybe centuries, depending on how far you want to stretch.
In comes the patent. And here's where it gets ugly. While, as the article said, patents were supposed to push innovation and competition, they harm both: A normal innovator cannot afford a patent, and competition is stifled because who holds the patent may dictate who may produce.
In the world of software it's even worse than in the real world. Frivulous patents for the equivalent of a toothpick aside, there are many things that can be done "right" only one way. There is often only one good algo for a certain task, with all the others falling behind. Should a company own the patent to a, say, search algo that is magnitudes faster than competing algorithms, this company has the monopoly on databases, if they so desire.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is as anti-capitalist and anti-free market as it gets. Our market system relies on the equilibrium between supplyer and demander, on the fact that price is made at the market by the rules of supply and demand. If one side has the power to overrule this and create monopolies to dictate price or, worse, competition, the free market is dead.
It's not much different with DRM, btw, where the format providers may dictate what kind of devices may be created. BluRay as well as HDDVD devices only get the ok (and the key) if they agree to implement a secure data path. You MUST NOT create a device that has none. Now, you could of course create a "free" format, but then those machines that play HDDVD/BluRay must not play your format, and the content industry will not provide content on your format (out of self interest). -> free trade dead.
As long as patents exist in the current form, we're going to steer towards something that caused the downfall of the Soviet Regimes. They, too, produced goods the consumer did not want. They had different reasons, but the result is essentially the same: The goods manufactured do not match the demand of the users. And so far, there is no law that force us to buy AT ALL.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The problem is "stealing someone else's ideas". Do you think that the OSS developers actually went out and "stole" the ideas? No - they independently came up with the same method of doing something, because it was basically obvious. The standard for obviousness is clearly far too low. How would you do it at all if not through an O-R mapping? Actually, I think that copyright is sufficient to protect software in general, but that's another argument.
There are plenty of big dumb companies who will be happy to license your ability to use and improve free software. M$ and IBM and other companies pushing for software patents will be happy to claim ownership of everyones' hard work. That's what this is really about, isn't it?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Americans CLAIM to love freedom. But we really love convenience. We pay lip service to wanting lots of choices, but so long as the few choices we have are accessible and provide immediate gratification, why should we care about some other clunky alternatives that we don't have?
So Microsoft spies on us while we use windows. So what? I don't actually notice. It doesn't inconvenience me in any direct way. And windows works the way I expect it to. I don't have to learn nearly as much as I do in order to use Linux, and all my games play on it out of the box. Oh, and I don't even have to install it...it comes on my computer. Convenience all around, so that's where my money winds up going.
The list of candidates to vote on is usually kept quite small. Sure, the two party system eliminates options, and our method of voter tallying is statistically absurd, but it is so darn CONVIENANT. For most of us, there is an obvious choice...the party choice. I don't have to bother listening to platforms or researching relevant issues...I just vote for my party and suddenly I am a good patriot with a license to complain. Isn't convenience wonderful?
Sure airport searches are a bit inconvenient if I am the one who gets searched...but the odds are low. Usually its some other guy who gets searched, and that makes me feel safer. Maybe they record and traffic my personal information, but I don't really feel any sting for that (for the most part, I don't even know its going on). I can fly anywhere and feel like my interests are safely guarded by the government. The convenience of this feeling far outweighs the minor inconveniences of the occasional long wait to get in the airplane.
So I can't copy DVD's. Oh well, I guess I will just pay them again. An extra fifteen bucks won't kill me. Breaking the law and risking punishment just so I can make personal backups is just a bit too inconvenient. Region encoding? What's that? I've never felt it's sting, because I buy my DVD's at Wall mart...not from some weird store way out in Europe...the shipping time alone is just too much, not to mention the extra cost. What I have got is convenient enough, and the added convenience you geeks talk about seems a little superfluous and way too much work to obtain. Nah, I like things the way they are.
So what if my cell phone calls are monitored and my position is tracked? So what if the providers are overcharging a bit because they can get away with it? Cell phones are an exemplar of convenience. So what if my internet usage is tracked and recorded? All they would ever do is prevent me from breaking the law anyway, right? That's ok with me. So long as the only people who get their rights abused by all this monitoring and information-tracking are a few social rabble-rousers, and not me, there really is no problem. I like all this convenience much better than the pains of actually making myself aware of what's going on and making sacrifices to ensure my continued privacy and freedom.
Power is a lot of work to keep hold of. Far too inconvenient. Let the politicians and big corporations fight over it. I am better off without any of it at all. Good riddance.
And God bless America!
Why are you guys going nuts. If people who write open source software openly steal stuff from comemrcial companies and pout it in open software the company that got stolen from has every right to sue.
So your saying if a robber came into your house and stole something and sold it on the net you wouldnt get himn arested?
Even if the free programs DO violate patents or copyrights, if they are published anonymously, who's to stop them?
By that logic there you can't sue filesharers for passing around mp3s. Obviously, you can, and people do. More importantly, though, most of us want to be able to use and create free software legally, and we want to be able to take credit for our own work. Not being able to do these things is a HUGE deal.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
This is sort of like saying that rhinos and pandas can't become extinct because we have been trying to eradicate rats for centuries, and they are doing well.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
We no longer need to encourage "inventors" anymore (in the software field), the Free/OSS Development model is proof of that. Thus, the patent system no longer promotes the progress of Science (in the area of Computer Science) and should be struck down - at least for software patents anyway.
Remove the government and some other organization, like the corporation, will jump in to fill the power gap. That's the problem with "libritatianism", it seeks to remove tyrany by removing the government but doesn't provide any protection against other would by tyrants.
With the exception of China, which is worse in every respect except patent law... yes, yes I would.
I was born and raised in the US. I've lived here all of my life, and I like it here. I spent alot of time and energy learning how to think, write code/OS's/programming languages etc. So that I could write better software and put it in the hands of the world because it's fun, and I'm tired of seeing the crap software being used by the masses.
If I have to move to Finland to be free to write code, I might just do that. Free sharing of information is the single most important requirement for the world moving forward both socially and technologically. If the US doesn't support that, I don't want to be a part of it or associated with it anymore.
I haven't moved yet, but in a year or two it's not that unlikely.
This is just your typical issue with regards to insane rulings and laws with regards to these issues like responsibility. Would this happen its likely to cripple OSS in the US but I honostly doubt that other countries would suffer from all this, apart from the fact that they might lose a few programmers.
I mean; this really isn't something new here. Just compare it to running a business. Would I open up a coffee bar and start selling cups of coffee in the US I take an awfull risk if the cups don't say "WARNING: This is HOT STUFF and if you use the contents of this cup to pour over your body you're bound to end up with burn marks" but that doesn't mean that not doing this will influence other oversea companies. It would make doing business in the US a little harder, but thats not difficult to overcome. Or what about the SCO case, you can read about the latest development. In the US that smokescreen was actually taken seriously and now, several months later, a judge ruled a lack of evidence. In Europe it wouldn't even have been accepted in court, as has been proven by a German judge calling FUD on SCO after they tried to sue several companies for their precious license violation.
IMO this is just a typical issue of some American people finally becoming aware what risks need to be taken to do certain things in the US, all thanks to those insane rulings. This is exactly the same sort of reason why last years F1 only started with 3 cars.
So in this case, being a European citizin, I'd say bring it on!
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Let's show this by historical example.
In the 19th century, there was heavy competition for the implementation of the telephone system. Edison wanted to enter the market. But Bell had already patented the system! What Edison did, then, was to invent a new way by which sounds can be inputted and outputted, and using his own, new system, managed to challenge Bell. Hence, patents in this case directly drove innovation.
But what if Bell had recieved a software patent? Then the patent would not cover, as in this case, the process by which his telephone worked. Instead, he would be able to patent the idea of long distance voice communication. Edison would not be able to enter the market, even if he improved on the implementation.
Software patents aren't patents. They are ways of making money by preventing innovation.
"If China gets really annoyed with us, they can simply stop buying US Bonds and put the government (and the economy) into freefall overnight. Yes, thanks to Bush's unprecedented deficit China could engineer the complete collapse of our economy, and probably our ability to govern, that easily."
But there's a very, very good reason for them not to do that. If the US economy tanks, the value of the dollar tanks too. Suddenly, all those US government bonds you refer to aren't worth anything, because they're valued in dollars. In addition, China needs the US consumer market to keep its economy working- that's why they've been prepared to buy all the bonds in the first place. It's not about bankrolling the Iraq war (why would china want to do that?), it's about bankrolling the purchase of consumer goods from China. Iraq's important and all but it's far from the only thing going on in the world, and in terms of US government debt the trade deficit is far more relevant.
Of course, if you really want to get the war involved you could start talking about military adventurism as historically being a feature of empires that can't address their real problems. And maybe bring in the importance of keeping oil priced in dollars to maintain the dollar's position as the world's reserve currency so that the treasury can carry on printing money and getting away with it.
But really, no major power like China wants a US economic collapse, on the contrary it must terrify them. They're trying to arrange a "soft landing" for the dollar's value. The only great powers I can imagine getting any benefit from such an occurance are Iran and Russia, and it would probably hurt Russia more than it helped them. Iran can't trade with the US so they might not care until the global economic turndown involved eventually reached them.
But yeah, no way is China going to stop buying US government bonds, unless the dollar collapses by itself. They'll carry on with their present strategy of diversifying into Euros and other currencies.