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NASA To Auction Automated Code Generation Patents
coondoggie writes "NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center said it is set to auction an exclusive license to five patents it holds for automated software development on November 11, 2010. NASA said the technology was originally developed to handle coding of control code for spacecraft swarms, but it is applicable to any commercial application where rule-based systems development is used."
i was kind of thinking that since, you know, WE payed NASA to invent stuff.. the public already owned it.
THL phish sticks
revelation. Billions of dollars in TARP spending and two wars heavily funded without so much as an eyebrows raise...but one of the foremost scientific research and exploration communities in the united states, dare i even say the world, which recently help design the rescue and recovery vehicle for trapped mine workers, now has to hold the equivalent of a technology "bake sale" for funding. when does this stop?
Good people go to bed earlier.
I'm sure we were not the first, nor as sophisticated, but in 1994 we wrote a program to write programs.
The port for sending commands to a robot was physically missing. The RS232 port was reserved for the terminal. So we connected a serial cable up to the robot controller and a pc. Then we wrote a program that would send the keystrokes to open a file for editing, edit it, save the program, and execute it. So when the pc would get a signal, it would calculate a trajectory for the robot, open the file on the controller, write the program, close it, then run it. Around 10 times a second.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
.... One company for $250,000 can prohibit the application of this idea to systems that do not pay up.
This is what is wrong with this deal, off the top of my head:
1) NASA would have developed this technology anyway, one must assume, as they haven't auctioned patents in the past (at least, not that I know of). In any case, how could the patent have been a motivator to do the work? Wouldn't it have been the problem they needed to solve? And who believes 250K is enough of a motivator for NASA anyway?
2) Now that we have the innovation done, all the patent is going to do is prevent its application for 20 years
3) Many companies have been generating test cases from Rules for years. Isn't there a prior art issue here?
4) Why should we fund government research only to tie it up with IP on a restrictive basis for only 250K? How is this a good deal for the Tax Payer? (It would be different if the income to government was big enough to offset the Taxes we pay, but this doesn't do that)
5) Software Patents! Evil! They are most certainly a mechanism to patent ideas rather than implementations, as there are far too many ways to implement an algorithm in software to restrict the patent to an actual invention.
NASA hurts it's own reputation horribly by auctioning software patents rather than holding them for the public trust and acknowledging the obvious: software patents are incompatible with a software industry.
They then compound the insult by taking advantage of some suckers paying cash for something that is legally questionable in light of Bilksi and that may soon have explicitly no value at all.
It's an obvious fact. The sooner we stop denying it and explicitly repudiate software patents as a matter of policy (as most every advanced nation already does), the sooner the damage to our economy stops.
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It looks more like they are patenting "nothing much at all." As in, "here are some use cases, here is a state machine that implements them, run our program, find questionable state transitions, ask users to decide what happens in those cases. Repeat until you have a complete formal spec."
This looks more like a case of a small group of people trying to justify their continued employment by pointing to their patents/minor revenue generated as evidence that they are doing something useful and so should not be laid off.
Email your rep. I did. Be clear and stay on this specific issues. Do not drift into a patents are evil rant. save that for a different email. Explain why you feel the patents should be made public and not auctioned.
It just so happens that my rep is on the Committee for science and technology. But let them know.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"WE" paid for the research, so WE should own the intellectual property. We paid for it. If the Universities want to own it outright, don't take public money!