It's possible to keep patents, and to use them as the early founders of Patent Law intended: to promote the sciences by protecting their discoveries for a limited time.
One problem (amongst others) I see with this, is the term "limited". In software 5 years is a *long* time let alone 20. I think there should be different timespans for different categories of patents at least, preferably no patents for math/software. Software would have adequate protection if patents would have a lifetime of 3-4 years.
Re:the answer is obviously: previous art. . .
on
Perens on Patents
·
· Score: 1
While that migth be true, I very much doubt that your, or even FSFs, pockets are deep enough to prove it in a court if you'd have one of "the big boys" at the other end. Unfortunatly.
One of the great breakthroughs in safety design came when ships started to be built with compartments, which would prevent a single hull puncture to sink the whole ship. (Sadly the Titanic's compartments were all aligned in one dimension, so when the puncture was very long, it compromised all compartments).
The punture on Titanic wasn't that long, the bigger problem was that the compartment walls wasn't high enough, so that when the stearn flooded and sank somewhat, the water spilled over from one compartment to the next resulting in further flooding, finally sinking the whole ship.
Sure this might be an opportunity, but I think most users will not even know that win98 has been discontinued. After all, it isn't like all people or even most people would use windows-update. (ppl should)
Since you won't get any of the products that is going to be retired with a new computer anyways, I think this won't affect anything much, with the exception of some companies that might upgrade.
OSS and ALSA are kernel sound drivers, while esound and arts are sound "servers".
OSS vs. ALSA has allready been resolved - kernel 2.6 comes with ALSA and defaults to it (OSS = decaprecated).
Now esound and arts is allready too much, and since MAS will at some point hopefully ship default with X (and it has been well thought out, low latency etc.), is platform cross-compatible and network transparent, chances are good that MAS will replace esound and arts.
In my opinion this is a step in the right direction.
I agree with your point but feel to correct yuo on one thing:
The cameras don't talk to each other, so it won't matter if the camera I buy next year doesn't speak FAT.
Oh really? You've never moved a memcard from one camera to another? You don't enjoy the convenience of tearing an SD Card out of its package and immediately jamming it into your camera, without reformating it first? (Which would erase any data already on the card)
I use Compact Flash cards as a substitute for disks - they are more resiliant and have more space. I usually format them to ext2 and guess what, one day my friend snapped picutures with his camera and filled his CF and I lended him my, formatted as ext2, and the camera had no problem as it formatted it to FAT itself.
So I doubt that compability would be an issue for new media, only if you need to save something allready on CF.
I'd say quite the opposite. As an sysadmin that does much administrative stuff on a server in another city, through ssh, i welcome this addition.
I see it as quite pointless installing X on a server w/o monitor etc. but this enables configuration tools to be written that looks good in X but works w/o as well.
I believe Open Source has another security boosting factor as well - so much of Open Source software is coded with devotion and "the want to do a fine job". Even if this would be true for some programmers in a company, companies have a high priority on "time = money", and thus deadlines come quicker than they should and some shortcuts may be taken.
I wish you suggestion about using WordPad would be valid, unfortunatly it is not.
Many probably would be using WordPad or similar, if it wasn't for the document fileformat. If you don't have the newest version of product XYZ chances are you will have difficulties "communicating" with other ppl.
I think you don't see the whole point either.. If the complete API would be available for MSHTML, Gecko could have an wrapper written for it the is identical to mshtml:s API. Now, the user could completly replace IE with Gecko and your kazaa etc. program would be the same and wouldn't even notice a difference.. (even if it expects mshtml and gets Gecko)
sql:s have odbc, why not give html-apis some uhapi (unified html api).. Ofcourse it would mean there has to be standards that are not embraced & extended..
Slashdot Mirror
One problem (amongst others) I see with this, is the term "limited". In software 5 years is a *long* time let alone 20. I think there should be different timespans for different categories of patents at least, preferably no patents for math/software. Software would have adequate protection if patents would have a lifetime of 3-4 years.
While that migth be true, I very much doubt that your, or even FSFs, pockets are deep enough to prove it in a court if you'd have one of "the big boys" at the other end. Unfortunatly.
The punture on Titanic wasn't that long, the bigger problem was that the compartment walls wasn't high enough, so that when the stearn flooded and sank somewhat, the water spilled over from one compartment to the next resulting in further flooding, finally sinking the whole ship.
Sure this might be an opportunity, but I think most users will not even know that win98 has been discontinued. After all, it isn't like all people or even most people would use windows-update. (ppl should)
Since you won't get any of the products that is going to be retired with a new computer anyways, I think this won't affect anything much, with the exception of some companies that might upgrade.
Oranges and apples..
OSS and ALSA are kernel sound drivers, while esound and arts are sound "servers".
OSS vs. ALSA has allready been resolved - kernel 2.6 comes with ALSA and defaults to it (OSS = decaprecated).
Now esound and arts is allready too much, and since MAS will at some point hopefully ship default with X (and it has been well thought out, low latency etc.), is platform cross-compatible and network transparent, chances are good that MAS will replace esound and arts.
In my opinion this is a step in the right direction.
I agree with your point but feel to correct yuo on one thing:
The cameras don't talk to each other, so it won't matter if the camera I buy next year doesn't speak FAT.
Oh really? You've never moved a memcard from one camera to another? You don't enjoy the convenience of tearing an SD Card out of its package and immediately jamming it into your camera, without reformating it first? (Which would erase any data already on the card)
I use Compact Flash cards as a substitute for disks - they are more resiliant and have more space. I usually format them to ext2 and guess what, one day my friend snapped picutures with his camera and filled his CF and I lended him my, formatted as ext2, and the camera had no problem as it formatted it to FAT itself.
So I doubt that compability would be an issue for new media, only if you need to save something allready on CF.
I'd say quite the opposite. As an sysadmin that does much administrative stuff on a server in another city, through ssh, i welcome this addition.
I see it as quite pointless installing X on a server w/o monitor etc. but this enables configuration tools to be written that looks good in X but works w/o as well.
I believe Open Source has another security boosting factor as well - so much of Open Source software is coded with devotion and "the want to do a fine job".
Even if this would be true for some programmers in a company, companies have a high priority on "time = money", and thus deadlines come quicker than they should and some shortcuts may be taken.
SuSE has for some time defaulted to Postfix..
I wish you suggestion about using WordPad would be valid, unfortunatly it is not.
Many probably would be using WordPad or similar, if it wasn't for the document fileformat. If you don't have the newest version of product XYZ chances are you will have difficulties "communicating" with other ppl.
And the feature race along with bloat goes on.
I think you don't see the whole point either..
If the complete API would be available for MSHTML, Gecko could have an wrapper written for it the is identical to mshtml:s API.
Now, the user could completly replace IE with Gecko and your kazaa etc. program would be the same and wouldn't even notice a difference.. (even if it expects mshtml and gets Gecko)
sql:s have odbc, why not give html-apis some uhapi (unified html api).. Ofcourse it would mean there has to be standards that are not embraced & extended..