| The big advantages that patents have over trade secrets are that they: | | 1. Have a limited term | 2. Require that you publish how you did it
True. This was why patents were invented in the first place, and many, many years ago those effect probably gave higher ECONOMIC benefits that the ECONOMIC drawbacks created by the monopoly. I very much doubt that is true anymore, and wasn't what I was talking about anyway.
| Trade secrets tie up the idea in perpituity
They tie up the idea for as long as nobody else get the same idea, which mean that they can apply to non-trivial ideas. In fact, the length of your monopoly is proportional to how non-obvious your idea is.
> and cause their inventors to keep the idea as secret as possible.
True, which means they can not used to get a monopoly on interfaces, nor can you start enforcing the monopoly after the industry has begun
> There are all kinds of negative effects from this.
> Imagine drug companies operating with this set of rules.
Heh, drug companies won't be allowed to publish their drugs unless they reveal what they contain. They may be able to keep the process of creating the drug a trade-secret, but not constituents of the finished products. So all competitors would have to do was to guess how to come up with that
The largest effect of abolishing patents would much cheaper medicine, which would
1) make the medicine affordable to many more people, and
2) free up a lot of money for research that
2a) could be shared freely between researchers, and thus avoid much of the duplication of effort in the current system, and
2b) would not be directed solely on patentable products, but also on new used of old remedies, as well as various life style changes.
Millions of lives would be saved every year (due to #1) if we abolished patents on medicine, and the number would increase over time (due to #2).
| Yes, you can use your own ideas in this environment. But your won't have the ideas expressed | in technical literature, scientific journals (at least publications from organizations that | want to make money like universities etc.) and of course the patents themselves to base your | ideas on. And of course you have to be pretty damn egotistical to think that the ideas YOU | personally have outweigh all the ideas that everyone else has.
I was talking freedom there, not utility. I am a programmer, I have broken the law (unknowingly) many times. I have often used techniques in my programs that I later learned were patented (like using XOR to implement a cursor, I did that as a kid while the patent was still valid, only learned about the patent decades later). The is my main emotional problem with patents, they basically give me the choice of 1) become a criminal, 2) become a lawyer. Of course there is also 3) get employment in a huge corporation like IBM with cross-licensing agreements with all the other large players in the patent field. None of the options are to my liking.
You can of course argue that this only calls for a reform of the patent system, and I agree that with a much more strict enforcement of "non-trivial" would make it extremely unlikely that people would "unintentionally" violate patents. And it would probably be possible to formulate the law to that interface patents and submarine patents would be rare or even impossible.
However, I don't think this can happen. Once you give people special privileges, they tend to treat them as God given rights, and fight for their extension. Just look at the copyright scene. And when money is involved it gets worse. For patents, not just the patent holders, but the entire patent industry fight for extending their application area. In Europe, EPO, which ought to be neutral, was the main lobbyist (and in fact the driving force), between the attempt to make software patents valid.
| Ultimately the loss of the ability to publish and have the commercial value of t
The saving over time has to be larger than interest on the initial investment for the free software (or any other cost saving measure) to be a good investment. Otherwise, you are better off putting the money in the bank.
The "intangibles" as you call it, avoiding lock in, is the reason that free software usually is the better investment in the long run. The freedom granted by the use of free software is important when you have to navigate your organization in an ever changing and unpredictable world.
Patents exist because they are an improvement on a system where everything is held as a trade secret.
The big difference is that trade secrets does not prevent me from use my own ideas. Patents does, which is a huge limitation in the personal freedom. Trade-secrets, like copyrights, only prevent me from duplicating other peoples ideas (or expressions), which is much less of a violation.
What is the point of bragging about the iPhone running OS X if the UI is different and you can't write applications for it? OS X has a very nice UI and a very nice application interface, with the first replaced and the second unavailable, mentioning it at the keynote is just spitting in the face of people.
You can sell as long a subscription as you want for anything, but the consumer is always entitled to cancel it after 6 month maximum. It is amazing the good a bit of regulation can do to a marketplace, contrary to Libertarian dogma.
WineX is free software, Cedega is not. It is a derived product covered by a non-free license. Something the WineX license allows
Wine is not GPL, it is LGPL, a much more liberal license than the GPL. It allows non-free derived products, as long as the Wine part of the derived product is still LGPL, and replaceable by the user. You can download the source of Wine part of CrossOver (it is no longer called CrossOver Office) by clicking on the Source tab at their home page. You can also get the source code for several other none-Wine components of CrossOver there.
The two businesses did not get their start the same way, CodeWeavers never made proprietary improvements to Wine. TransGaming did, which is why Wine changed license. CodeWeavers and other contributers were tired of the uneven competition between contributers and leeches that the old BSDL license encoruage. The true genius of the copyleft licenses is not high ideals of the FSF they were created to promote, but that they create a level playground for competing companies to cooperate in. "You can get my contributions, only if I can get yours".
Software development is not hard. There is really just a single technique you have to learn, and it predates software development with a few millennia. It is divide and conquer.
When you have a large problem, divide it into smaller problems that can be dealt with separately. All the other techniques and tools (OOP, structured programming, extreme programming, top-down, bottom-up, rapid prototyping, waterfall model, etc) are just specializations of this. It sounds like you quickly got bogged down by the details of programming languages and tools, happens a lot to younger programmers. Just remember that these details are just details, and not the real issue.
The only slightly tricky part in software development is how to divide the problem so that each subproblem can studied in isolation, or at least with a minimum of information about the other subproblems.
> Gee he has provided this software FREE of CHARGE for 16+ years.
Which kind of demonstrate why I prefer to use free software vs. merely gratis software. Free software will live on as long as their is an interest, while merely gratis software depend solely on the owners ability to find a way to justify continuing the work on it.
If the Linden scripting language is really "pretty easy, just like C++" I very much doubt that they have 375k contributing users. C++ is hard enough for professional programmers, and not a language for getting non-programmers to contribute anything.
Well, the majority of national legislation in EU nations these days are simply implementing EU directives, so the question is how independent they really are. And in the question of state/national vs federal/union funding, the similarities certainly seem larger than the differences.
DejaNews invented the X-No-Archive header, so it can hardly predate DejaNews. And yes, I was there as well.
And even before DejaNews, one of the standard pieces of advice given to new users on Usenet was "Don't post anything you wouldn't want a potential employer to read 10 years from now". Not everybody read these advices though, and some people was chocked when they discovered their posts wouldn't go away.
I really don't care who is responsible if my kid has been killed by a drunk driver. I just want to prevent it from happening in the first place. If you feel your personal integrity violated by a car that won't let you drive while drunk, I suggest you go hit yourself with a brick until it goes over.
Your fucking neuroses are less important than the life of my kid.
The FSF has contractual obligation to me, and I guess thousands of other contributors, that limit what they can do to with the GPL. When you donate software to the FSF, you get a signed contract back stipulating what they can do with it. It obviously leaves some freedom to the FSF (as seen with GPL3), but it is not a blank check.
Most of the more mature free software supporters have never treated specific companies as "friends" or "foes", except in the context of a specific battle. The "I hate Microsoft" or "I love Apple" sentiments have mostly been reserved for fora dominated by a younger population, such as/..
I blame Hollywood (or, more correctly, popular literature in general) for bringing up kids to believe in a world where people (and corporations) are "good" or "bad", rather than a world where people have interests that are aligned with, or contrary to, your own.
The comment does not really show a decline. The person posting the parent comment had obviously not read the interview to its finish, the review was quite negative toward the end. [The review falls into the same trap as many done by "professional" reviewers, namely to function as a soapbox for the reviewers opinion on the subject matter of the book, rather than on the book itself.] Not reading TFA before commenting has always been a hallmark of/., so no decline there.
Of course, when I read the comment it was moderated +5. Usually a comment doesn't get more than one or two positive moderations before cooler heads who have had time to read TFA prevails, and moderate the comment down. So maybe the comment does after all demonstrate a decline.
It is fun how a lot of people here who claim they would never contribute to an ad-financed Wikipedia, obviously have no problem contributing to another ad-financed community site.
A three weeks old baby doesn't understand the concept of rights either, yet it is protected by them. Unless you want to increase the legal abortion age to around two years after birth, you have to find a better argument.
A similar argument can be made with severely retarded and some kind of insane people.
Slashdot Mirror
No one will ever know.
> How long will it take me to walk the 5km into town given that I walk at 5km/hour? Simple.
Much harder than calculating how long it will take to walk 3 miles into town, given that you walk 3 miles per hour?
| The big advantages that patents have over trade secrets are that they:
|
| 1. Have a limited term
| 2. Require that you publish how you did it
True. This was why patents were invented in the first place, and many, many years ago those effect probably gave higher ECONOMIC benefits that the ECONOMIC drawbacks created by the monopoly. I very much doubt that is true anymore, and wasn't what I was talking about anyway.
| Trade secrets tie up the idea in perpituity
They tie up the idea for as long as nobody else get the same idea, which mean that they can apply to non-trivial ideas. In fact, the length of your monopoly is proportional to how non-obvious your idea is.
> and cause their inventors to keep the idea as secret as possible.
True, which means they can not used to get a monopoly on interfaces, nor can you start enforcing the monopoly after the industry has begun
> There are all kinds of negative effects from this.
> Imagine drug companies operating with this set of rules.
Heh, drug companies won't be allowed to publish their drugs unless they reveal what they contain. They may be able to keep the process of creating the drug a trade-secret, but not constituents of the finished products. So all competitors would have to do was to guess how to come up with that
The largest effect of abolishing patents would much cheaper medicine, which would
1) make the medicine affordable to many more people, and
2) free up a lot of money for research that
2a) could be shared freely between researchers, and thus avoid much of the duplication of effort in the current system, and
2b) would not be directed solely on patentable products, but also on new used of old remedies, as well as various life style changes.
Millions of lives would be saved every year (due to #1) if we abolished patents on medicine, and the number would increase over time (due to #2).
| Yes, you can use your own ideas in this environment. But your won't have the ideas expressed
| in technical literature, scientific journals (at least publications from organizations that
| want to make money like universities etc.) and of course the patents themselves to base your
| ideas on. And of course you have to be pretty damn egotistical to think that the ideas YOU
| personally have outweigh all the ideas that everyone else has.
I was talking freedom there, not utility. I am a programmer, I have broken the law (unknowingly) many times. I have often used techniques in my programs that I later learned were patented (like using XOR to implement a cursor, I did that as a kid while the patent was still valid, only learned about the patent decades later). The is my main emotional problem with patents, they basically give me the choice of 1) become a criminal, 2) become a lawyer. Of course there is also 3) get employment in a huge corporation like IBM with cross-licensing agreements with all the other large players in the patent field. None of the options are to my liking.
You can of course argue that this only calls for a reform of the patent system, and I agree that with a much more strict enforcement of "non-trivial" would make it extremely unlikely that people would "unintentionally" violate patents. And it would probably be possible to formulate the law to that interface patents and submarine patents would be rare or even impossible.
However, I don't think this can happen. Once you give people special privileges, they tend to treat them as God given rights, and fight for their extension. Just look at the copyright scene. And when money is involved it gets worse. For patents, not just the patent holders, but the entire patent industry fight for extending their application area. In Europe, EPO, which ought to be neutral, was the main lobbyist (and in fact the driving force), between the attempt to make software patents valid.
| Ultimately the loss of the ability to publish and have the commercial value of t
The saving over time has to be larger than interest on the initial investment for the free software (or any other cost saving measure) to be a good investment. Otherwise, you are better off putting the money in the bank.
The "intangibles" as you call it, avoiding lock in, is the reason that free software usually is the better investment in the long run. The freedom granted by the use of free software is important when you have to navigate your organization in an ever changing and unpredictable world.
The big difference is that trade secrets does not prevent me from use my own ideas. Patents does, which is a huge limitation in the personal freedom. Trade-secrets, like copyrights, only prevent me from duplicating other peoples ideas (or expressions), which is much less of a violation.
What is the point of bragging about the iPhone running OS X if the UI is different and you can't write applications for it? OS X has a very nice UI and a very nice application interface, with the first replaced and the second unavailable, mentioning it at the keynote is just spitting in the face of people.
You can sell as long a subscription as you want for anything, but the consumer is always entitled to cancel it after 6 month maximum. It is amazing the good a bit of regulation can do to a marketplace, contrary to Libertarian dogma.
> Why? This kind of legislation is good.
It basically put US 10 years behind the rest of the world with regard to cell phones.
WineX is free software, Cedega is not. It is a derived product covered by a non-free license. Something the WineX license allows
Wine is not GPL, it is LGPL, a much more liberal license than the GPL. It allows non-free derived products, as long as the Wine part of the derived product is still LGPL, and replaceable by the user. You can download the source of Wine part of CrossOver (it is no longer called CrossOver Office) by clicking on the Source tab at their home page. You can also get the source code for several other none-Wine components of CrossOver there.
The two businesses did not get their start the same way, CodeWeavers never made proprietary improvements to Wine. TransGaming did, which is why Wine changed license. CodeWeavers and other contributers were tired of the uneven competition between contributers and leeches that the old BSDL license encoruage. The true genius of the copyleft licenses is not high ideals of the FSF they were created to promote, but that they create a level playground for competing companies to cooperate in. "You can get my contributions, only if I can get yours".
I never heard of EDGE before, so if it is available in Europe, it is not exactly marketed heavily.
Software development is not hard. There is really just a single technique you have to learn, and it predates software development with a few millennia. It is divide and conquer.
When you have a large problem, divide it into smaller problems that can be dealt with separately. All the other techniques and tools (OOP, structured programming, extreme programming, top-down, bottom-up, rapid prototyping, waterfall model, etc) are just specializations of this. It sounds like you quickly got bogged down by the details of programming languages and tools, happens a lot to younger programmers. Just remember that these details are just details, and not the real issue.
The only slightly tricky part in software development is how to divide the problem so that each subproblem can studied in isolation, or at least with a minimum of information about the other subproblems.
> Gee he has provided this software FREE of CHARGE for 16+ years.
Which kind of demonstrate why I prefer to use free software vs. merely gratis software. Free software will live on as long as their is an interest, while merely gratis software depend solely on the owners ability to find a way to justify continuing the work on it.
If the Linden scripting language is really "pretty easy, just like C++" I very much doubt that they have 375k contributing users. C++ is hard enough for professional programmers, and not a language for getting non-programmers to contribute anything.
Well, the majority of national legislation in EU nations these days are simply implementing EU directives, so the question is how independent they really are. And in the question of state/national vs federal/union funding, the similarities certainly seem larger than the differences.
A project funded by California and Texas would probably also be called "US-based" in the rest of the world, even if no federal money were involved.
Bureaucracy is almost 100% manpower, and thus help on unemployment. Albeit not in the best way.
DejaNews invented the X-No-Archive header, so it can hardly predate DejaNews. And yes, I was there as well.
And even before DejaNews, one of the standard pieces of advice given to new users on Usenet was "Don't post anything you wouldn't want a potential employer to read 10 years from now". Not everybody read these advices though, and some people was chocked when they discovered their posts wouldn't go away.
> You would have thought the same thing for 'regions' on DVD's, but the public didnt form a lynching gang on that one either.
Mostly because region free DVD players were available from day one.
I really don't care who is responsible if my kid has been killed by a drunk driver. I just want to prevent it from happening in the first place. If you feel your personal integrity violated by a car that won't let you drive while drunk, I suggest you go hit yourself with a brick until it goes over.
Your fucking neuroses are less important than the life of my kid.
The FSF has contractual obligation to me, and I guess thousands of other contributors, that limit what they can do to with the GPL. When you donate software to the FSF, you get a signed contract back stipulating what they can do with it. It obviously leaves some freedom to the FSF (as seen with GPL3), but it is not a blank check.
Most of the more mature free software supporters have never treated specific companies as "friends" or "foes", except in the context of a specific battle. The "I hate Microsoft" or "I love Apple" sentiments have mostly been reserved for fora dominated by a younger population, such as /..
I blame Hollywood (or, more correctly, popular literature in general) for bringing up kids to believe in a world where people (and corporations) are "good" or "bad", rather than a world where people have interests that are aligned with, or contrary to, your own.
The comment does not really show a decline. The person posting the parent comment had obviously not read the interview to its finish, the review was quite negative toward the end. [The review falls into the same trap as many done by "professional" reviewers, namely to function as a soapbox for the reviewers opinion on the subject matter of the book, rather than on the book itself.] Not reading TFA before commenting has always been a hallmark of /., so no decline there.
Of course, when I read the comment it was moderated +5. Usually a comment doesn't get more than one or two positive moderations before cooler heads who have had time to read TFA prevails, and moderate the comment down. So maybe the comment does after all demonstrate a decline.
It is fun how a lot of people here who claim they would never contribute to an ad-financed Wikipedia, obviously have no problem contributing to another ad-financed community site.
A three weeks old baby doesn't understand the concept of rights either, yet it is protected by them. Unless you want to increase the legal abortion age to around two years after birth, you have to find a better argument.
A similar argument can be made with severely retarded and some kind of insane people.
P-code was a popular VM a few decades before anyone thought of JVM as a new revolutionary concept.