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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."
"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.
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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.
I don't have time to answer you. My favorite television show is on now.
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!
Just days before the European Commission's next hearing on patent policy that is still being hatched despite the last directive's overwhelming defeat in Parliament, several recent publications discuss developments of the law on Tux' home continent, and successful steps to avert software patents: The huge new book on "The War over Software Patents in the European Union" by the founder of NoSoftwarePatents has just been released for download. If you prefer a few hundred pages less, see the latest issue of the International Journal of Law and Information Technology for a scholarly article.
It's a theory of mine that linking to a reputable site, such as Wikipedia will get any post modded informative, even if the link is completely irrelevant.
You may be right.
Chicken (gallus gallus domesticus).
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.