Some people here seem to be missing some really important facts.
1) Patents expire. They expire because their purpose is to make sure that things continue to go forward. Patents are there to encourage people to share information. Expecting that patents (and even abuses) are going to make progress stop in it's tracks is a little ridiculous.
2) Without patents, many innovations of the past may not have been invented, or may not have been shared, so that we can take them for granted today. Having a system where entire categories of patents are restricted/unavailable is a little unreasonable. It seems a little naive to assume that innovation can't happen in just about anything.
3) The USPO doesn't really have an easy job. There is no doubt that some sort of reform is desperately needed, but we don't live in the same world that created that system. We need to look constructivly at recreating a new system, not just bashing the only one we have.
That said, I'd be interested in hearing how people think the patent system should be changed. What would you (or Brian Boytano) do to make it better. It seems to me that a logical place to start would be to simply make the application process more difficult, but what about having a graduated patent process. Lets face it, 17 years is an eternity in today's business. Maybe you should have to invent the wheel, or oxygen to get a 17 year patent, but maybe a patent on an algorythem should default to 5 years, or 1. And of course, to approve a 17 year patent, there would be some serious procedure to go through, including maybe some expert testimony or something, and a waiting period for people to show "prior art" to help prevent a false claim. I really don't know enough about the current patent system to even know if I'm already listing things that currently exist or not (I don't think so though).
I think that he should be granted a patent, and be allowed to profit from his invention/discovery, but I don't know enough about currently used processes to be sure. I don't think that he be granted unlimitted rights though. Some limitations of what kind of royalties he can demand, or the amount of time he gets to hold a patent like this should apply.
Yeah.. you can find them here, along with a lot of other geeky gift stuff.. Linux stickers, #include beer.h beer glasses.. perl t-shirts etc. The only reason I know of it is because it was mentioned on/. a while back...
One thing to remember. Sure at first, that would be overkill, but as time goes on, people will always find a way to fill, and eventually overload the pipe, no matter how big it is.
Last time I tried, (about 4 or 5 months ago), it ran, but once you were in it, you couldn't do anything useful (like click on anything in the program, or do anything at all).
One is forced to ask.. why not just get look into starting a GPL'd project that does something simillar, and then we wouldn't need to emulate, "not-emulate" or otherwise..
I think the thing is they also have a product that they sell, that's a complete package (hardware and all), and I think some aspects of that might not be GPL'd.
One thing to be concerned about is that because of it's design (one monolithic server), it probably won't scale well if you get past the point where your workgroups can't all use the same server. The problem is that it doesn't actually use imap like many of the other servers/systems listed here, it does all of it's sharing and email reading etc, directly throught the file system. With most of the other systems, they use sql, imap, and web front ends in combination to make them much more scaleable..
If I recall, it's free, does 128 bit ssl, is very easy to install/configure, and has a nice web (ssl'd of course) administration interface.
It also has some decent modules that can be slapped in very easily. and some built in toys for application building (like support for a number of databases out of the box).
The product is free, but they'll want to try to sell you site developement tools and the like after you've had a chance to use it. It's also written in a strangish language called pike, but you really don't have to deal with it much if at all, and if you're familiar with C, then pike will look very normal to you. Pike is basically C, but in an interpreted form like perl.
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1) Patents expire. They expire because their purpose is to make sure that things continue to go forward. Patents are there to encourage people to share information. Expecting that patents (and even abuses) are going to make progress stop in it's tracks is a little ridiculous.
2) Without patents, many innovations of the past may not have been invented, or may not have been shared, so that we can take them for granted today. Having a system where entire categories of patents are restricted/unavailable is a little unreasonable. It seems a little naive to assume that innovation can't happen in just about anything.
3) The USPO doesn't really have an easy job. There is no doubt that some sort of reform is desperately needed, but we don't live in the same world that created that system. We need to look constructivly at recreating a new system, not just bashing the only one we have.
That said, I'd be interested in hearing how people think the patent system should be changed. What would you (or Brian Boytano) do to make it better. It seems to me that a logical place to start would be to simply make the application process more difficult, but what about having a graduated patent process. Lets face it, 17 years is an eternity in today's business. Maybe you should have to invent the wheel, or oxygen to get a 17 year patent, but maybe a patent on an algorythem should default to 5 years, or 1. And of course, to approve a 17 year patent, there would be some serious procedure to go through, including maybe some expert testimony or something, and a waiting period for people to show "prior art" to help prevent a false claim. I really don't know enough about the current patent system to even know if I'm already listing things that currently exist or not (I don't think so though).
I think that he should be granted a patent, and be allowed to profit from his invention/discovery, but I don't know enough about currently used processes to be sure. I don't think that he be granted unlimitted rights though. Some limitations of what kind of royalties he can demand, or the amount of time he gets to hold a patent like this should apply.
http://www.thinkgeek.com/
One is forced to ask.. why not just get look into starting a GPL'd project that does something simillar, and then we wouldn't need to emulate, "not-emulate" or otherwise..
One thing to be concerned about is that because of it's design (one monolithic server), it probably won't scale well if you get past the point where your workgroups can't all use the same server. The problem is that it doesn't actually use imap like many of the other servers/systems listed here, it does all of it's sharing and email reading etc, directly throught the file system. With most of the other systems, they use sql, imap, and web front ends in combination to make them much more scaleable..
It also has some decent modules that can be slapped in very easily. and some built in toys for application building (like support for a number of databases out of the box).
The product is free, but they'll want to try to sell you site developement tools and the like after you've had a chance to use it. It's also written in a strangish language called pike, but you really don't have to deal with it much if at all, and if you're familiar with C, then pike will look very normal to you. Pike is basically C, but in an interpreted form like perl.
http://www.roxen.com/