Microsoft didn't write all of Windows 7 from scratch. It's surely got plenty of "15 year old code", and probably older. So Microsoft's policy says that it cannot patch some Windows 7 bugs.
Maybe there indeed isn't any 15 year old code, as MS cycles its codebase slowly through "new" OS releases over the years. But there's doubtless 10 year old code, and certainly 5 year old code. So in 5-10 years, everyone buying Windows 7 today (and tomorrow) will be forced to buy the next "upgrade". And the one after.
Or run seriously insecure code that the bad guys have had 5, 10, 15 years to figure out how to exploit.
Microsoft: job security through product insecurity.
You're making an otherwise useful discussion difficult by portraying my argument as "ideology", starting out mocking it with childish imagery. You're the one who seems to think that any kind of business that isn't a vast war outside one's actual core business is unable to compete. Who thinks "change is scary" is a legitimate business value. Really that all sounds like you have some ideology you're applying here, not pragmatic business sense. If you'll stick to the actual arguments instead of the inaccurate labeling, we can keep discussing it.
I'm not talking about "peace and love"; I'm talking about inventors investing their money in investment and non-infringement - and in defending from overly broad patents that invite infringement. I've invented plenty of things, I've been part of business operations that have created patents, ranging from legit to bogus (for fake IP assets, for "defensive" protection, and for patent trolling, as well as to prevent the competition from harvesting the invention without the expense of inventing it). These weapons, as I've described, are extremely wasteful. And that strategy has the effect of locking out smaller players, more likely risktakers, from inventing, which is bad for progress. And progress isn't just something valuable we all depend on - it's what entrepreneurs sell, which includes me and most people in the economy I depend on.
I don't expect patent warriors to "lay down their weapons" all at once and unilaterally, even though they probably have a lot less to lose than they might fear, and a lot more to gain. Especially because the attitude you're presenting is indeed popular among global corporations, especially in technology (including medicine/chemistry). But having worked among plenty of those corps, embedded in their culture, I have seen how that approach is just yet another wasteful abuse that is entrenched among the less intellectually productive places, that is inferior in making profit. Which is why all I'm talking about here is the fallacy these "community patent defense" orgs are pushing, which should be among the first places to get onto a properly productive track. And patent law reform itself, which would deflate a lot of these fallacious arguments and defang a lot of these wasteful destructive strategies. Which is why I'm debating you here: so people reading can see the difference between sticking to the sensible original basis of the patent regime, applied to the current economics of the balance between rights and commerce.
If you want to debate the business and industrial economics, I'm interested. If you want some kind of culture war instead, you can keep it all for yourself to do with as you wish.
You're always going to need a lawyer when you're making money in business. But the cost of lawyers to defend yourself from infringement charges is a lot less than the cost to generate a portfolio of "defensive" patent counterattacks. Especially if you don't infringe, though even that can require paying lawyers to test your product against patented versions. Just a lot less than the army with a counterattack portfolio.
Patenting a flurry of inventions you will not exploit except to sue competitors over makes you weaker. To prevent chinks in the armor, you need a very large portfolio that never does you any good except when you're spending money being sued. If you just invest your money in promptly exploiting your inventions in the marketplace, you'll be much more focused on your core business, employ a lot fewer lawyers who produce nothing but invoices and complexity, and be more profitable. And make more progress.
Google. And a "public domain" registry into which orgs like these publish inventions, well indexed. PubPat is a nonprofit law org that works to get patents revoked, especially using prior art - I expect they have quite a good library and index. And I expect that there is a way to submit inventions to the PTO without patenting them, which gives the PTO the prior art that prevents future patents of that invention.
But I also expect that the PTO could use a much better index, and a better system to populate and search it. Because it seems to grant patents despite prior art all the time.
I prefer my position. You're describing an escalating arms race that encourages patenting everything conceivable, just in case it might be used against some possible future infringement victim. Which means each infringement someone wants to get away with requires many "defensive" patents - that are really all offensive, to be traded in exchange for infringing. So those who can afford to play engage in constant patent warfare, while the cloud of shrapnel makes it too expensive for all but the largest players to play. Patents A and B might be legit, but C through 0xFFFFFFFF are created just to blast each other, creating nothing but destruction.
That is a hugely wasteful approach. Every legitimate patent for a useful invention gets paired with at least one bogus one that's never exploited to give anyone something they want, to neutralize its infringement suit. Every bogus patent requires lawyers and their support teams, as well as probably much more lawyer work on the useful patent it neutralizes. Overall a vast amount of work that produces nothing (except fat lawyers, looking for more trouble). And a lot of that worthless work is done in the courts, at public expense - subsidizing the rich players to spin their wheels.
And the fundamental use of patents, to protect progress, is mostly stifled by exactly the system justified only by its protective function, now neglected.
Instead, if patents are used according to their actual prescription in the Constitution, they will be used only to protect an investor's development investment long enough for them to attempt to exploit the invention in the market. Content and software inventions that benefit from the inverted economics that physical inventions do (mostly market saturation diminishing returns inverted into the network effect exponentializing them) wouldn't even be patentable, because that compromise is self-defeating. And physical ones would protect merely the specific mechanism, not the market niche a mechanism satisfies.
There's plenty of ways to corrupt a patent system. Its basis is rooted in a corrupt compromise of our rights to freely express ourselves. But since there's apparently a secret patent on the world of sunshine unicorns dancing amidst rainbow farts, such a compromise is still necessary. However, that compromise can now be much more minimal than even the original formulations back at the beginning of the Industrial Age, when Enlightenment Era legislators could already see the essential value in the most freely exchanged information. Instead we have a much more maximal regime steadily developed by exploiters of the Information Age in the Corporate Era. You advocate continuing that regime to its extreme, though it's already ruining us.
I prefer the simpler, legitimate minimization of synthetic government monopolies. I prefer progress and freedom to an endless firefight.
I don't understand your scenario. How is publishing an invention into the public domain going to be more limited in scope than a patent would be? How is the public domain prior art going to protect for unlimited exploitation any less than the patent would be?
If anything, the public domain can be more broadly illustrative than the patent would be. If these orgs dedicated their activity to cultivating the public domain, advising publishers into it for quality documentation the way they now do patents, the public domain would be easily invoked to dismiss any patent claim. Possibly (if the PTO were reformed to be a legit office) even easily used by patent examiners to nip invalid patents in the bud - rather than wait for a court, and then an appeals court, to determine the exclusions.
Public domain cannot be used to exclude implementation. Otherwise it has all the properties that a patent for defending implementation rights by anyone who wants them. Perhaps with the exception of a registry as accessible as the PTO library. But Google goes a long way towards that for the public domain, and one of these orgs could go the rest of the way by indexing the public prior art, perhaps even better than the PTO's patent registry.
And that kind of reversed momentum in the patent industry could enable reforming the patent industry. Once there's a sizeable interest in registering in the public domain rather than patents, there will be less unified defense of patents. And then the government can find alternatives to the patent industry for bribes and other lobbying utilities when redefining patents. Preferably to solely physical devices with a working model, solely for its unique mechanism (not its general purpose or result), for some time short enough for it to recoup its development investment but not long enough to exclude diversity of vendors for most of its useful market lifecycle. In other words, back to the minimal compromise necessary to allow inventors to recoup their investment when successful, without fearing competitors will start spending their own investment on selling it once the inventor has spent that amount giving it to them. In the content and software (and related, especially in the future) industries, that would eliminate patents (in favor of copyrights, which need their own parallel reform). And mechanical patents would restore sanity to economics in industries from drugs to paperclips. But only if there's an industry with a vested interest in not patenting, but otherwise protecting exploitation rights for everyone.
It's absurd only if you ignore the fact that the display I described has e-ink for only a "super low power B&W e-ink layer", and is mainly a "full color, high frame rate layer". The e-ink layer is only use in "e-reader" modes, which can be much lower power.
As for a "TV", try using your TV to read a PDF. On a train. Without a graphics chip, or a network to get the data.
The point is that we need not separate "netbooks" and "e-readers", but a single tablet that is just a display, renderer and wireless network node. But I guess until we get one in about 5 years, the future to you will just seem "absurd".
No, releasing an invention into the public domain negates any patent. If one has the right to do it, like if one holds the patent. Or if one just releases into the public domain instead of the long, costly and complex process of patenting.
Covenants not to sue can have wriggle room. And to be enforced, someone has to sue the party making the covenant. Public domain prevents suing much more effectively (though nothing is perfect protection from a frivolous lawyer) than any patent and covenant can be.
No, I have completely called BS on the need for a patent to do what "defensive patents" claim.
If the OIN (or anyone else) simply released all their patents into the public domain, then there would be completely clear defense for anyone using them without restriction - which is what "the point" is supposed to be. If the OIN wanted to also deliver legal advice or representation to people using something OIN put in the public domain, that would actually be useful to protect users of OIN's "portfolio".
The only reason to maintain a patent instead of just releasing into public domain is to exclude someone else from using what's patented. That is indeed the only difference between a patent and the public domain.
A patent doesn't put anything in the public domain. I think you just don't know what "public domain" means. It means there is no owner, no one can exert property rights in it, there's no legal way to exclude anyone from using it.
A patent is a registration that prohibits anyone else implementing what's patented. That's its entire point. Publishing it doesn't endanger that exclusive ownership, and lets everyone else know what they're excluded from implementing (unless they get a license from the patent holder).
I also think you don't really understand software patents, especially how Microsoft (and its ilk) use them to interfere with others competing with them, or even with interoperating with them.
Covenants not to sue are transient. You'd have to sue them to enforce it, which makes it useless to small operations.
Putting something in the public domain excludes patents or other restrictions on implementing it. That is what a serious inventor does when they want to protect "the community" ("the public") from interference in using something they invented, or even just that they did which might be subject to a patent later, but cannot because it's in the public domain instead.
All this talk of "defensive patents" that supposedly "protect the community" is just a fraud. To protect the community, take all the documentation of the patent, and put it in the public domain. Then, anyone who wants can implement the tech, without restriction, forever. Keeping it patented retains the power of the patent holder to deny implementation to someone, sometime.
If they were really serious about merely protecting the community, they'd give up the patent control entirely. But it's clear that "the" community just means whoever the patent holder wants to defend from someone else who they exclude. That's entirely against what the Linux way of real open development means: anyone, anytime can join the community by coding and releasing.
These "defensive" patent orgs will bite us in the ass. Otherwise they wouldn't be investing time and money in not just the patent portfolios and all the work to maintain them, but also in conning us into believing it's for our own good.
What we need is a tablet that has a superfast, hirez display, superfast wireless networking, and nearly nothing else. A wireless display peripheral at 1920x1080 (or, better yet, WQUXGA at 3840x1200) with a full color, high frame rate layer and a super low power B&W e-ink layer. A minimal CPU for running an X server's application and Linux - or some smaller "remote display" network OS and application. A 2-channel stereo soundchip. And a 600Mbps (DVI 552Mbps + 48Mbps data) that's 3x the speed of 802.11n.
The audio/video data delivered to it (and from it, as videophone, for a "deluxe" bidirectional media terminal) would be delivered by local feeds for home and conference use, or over really fast broadband. But the unit itself should be just a display (and recording) terminal, with app processing hosted at a stationary host.
So we've probably got at least 5 years before we get one of these. The display and networking bandwidth are higher than even the fastest desktop machines, with a few pioneering exceptions. By that time it should cost under $300. Until then, the rest are just prototypes.
The reason digital content is different from physical property is that, unless the content is unique private data, I don't care if someone else gets a copy. That is whydigital content is better than physical matter.
These crooked engineers can make all the dishonest metaphors they want. But if we want to give away stuff for free, because we don't have any less when we give it - indeed we often have more, because we now have something in common with more people - then we're going to.
My fair use of a CD includes lending it to someone who plays it whenever they want, or playing it at a party for a bunch of strangers, even if I leave the room. That's protected by law, which mostly recognizes that copyright restrictions are exceptions to our free speech rights, and our rights to use our property however we wish (so long as it doesn't actually damage someone - and no, depriving them of a sales opportunity isn't damage). Copyright was a compromise with our rights back when it was sometimes necessary to promote the progress of science and useful arts". That compromise now backfires, holding back progress more than it promotes it, and the exclusive rights now exceed the "limited times" allowed by the Constitution.
They can reinvent digital handcuffs as often as they want. I won't buy them for myself.
Who's destroying a business? Oracle is just fine. Sun is no worse than it was before the merger announcement. This whole story is BS.
And there's no case here where a government agency "can't figure out how to prevent a monopoly". There's no reality to how you're depicting this situation.
And we do have to choose between destroying a business or letting it become a monopoly, the monopoly is the worse option. A new business will replace the destroyed one, as has happened every time a monopoly business has been destroyed (however rarely that has happened).
If it displeases environmentalists, it will be because it's still really bad for the environment. Using solar to preheat the water instead of more coal to preheat it just admits that solar is a more effective tech for generating energy than coal is. Any coal still burned is still polluting the Greenhouse, creating huge and unmanageable costs just a little down the road (and downwind, the typical "coal is clean" illusion).
They should just convert the entire plant to solar. But coal is too subsidized for them to abandon it, and its lobbyists have too tight a chokehold on the government for solar to have an equal shot at economic efficiency.
No, there's nothing stopping Sun from taking legitimate steps to protect itself, the same kind of commercial decisions and actions that it has always taken. The FTC doesn't stop a company from defending itself from market forces during a merger. Otherwise no large merger would ever happen in a competitive marketplace, because the merger's timeframe would indeed leave the company helpless. Sun isn't at all the first company in this position.
Obama's administration might not have fast tracked approval, but it did approve it very quickly, without evaluating issues like the MySQL risks that the EU has identified.
Capitol Hill protects and even mollycoddles the tech industry. In this case, it's shirking that responsibility. The EU is the one doing its due diligence to protect the market it's responsible for.
The feds (whether in the US or in the EU) are there to protect us from monopolies and other market abuse. Oracle merging with Sun substantially reduces consumer choices, and also threatens the viability of MySQL, which would be a substantial reduction in consumer choice.
"Fast track" means "declines to determine whether the market is threatened", AKA "shirks its obligation to protect the market".
How is Sun "unable to defend itself"? The whole point of this story is that the merger hasn't happened. So Sun is just as able to defend itself as before the attempt at merging was announced.
Besides, Oracle and Sun's directors know that mergers like the one with Sun take a long time, and are not guaranteed to be allowed. So that risk had to have been taken with this scenario in the math. If that could possibly hurt Sun's business in the meantime, that's Sun's fault - and Oracle's problem. Because if the merger goes through, they'll have paid full price for a damaged Sun. And if the merger fails, Sun will have been damaged for no benefit at all to Sun's shareholders, which the next target of an Oracle acquisition will rightly fear, making Oracle less able to acquire companies, which it must do to survive.
In any case, this whole article is BS. The EU antitrust division is taking longer not just to "bash American companies". The EU is concerned that MySQL will stop being a viable choice once it's owned by Oracle. That MySQL's open source community will no longer thrive once it's controlled by Oracle's execs instead of Sun's. That's a valid concern - that Obama's government just ignored when it immediately OK'd the deal.
The corporate mass media will spin this story any way it can to help kill anything about Sun that promoted freedom, choice and innovation. It worships Oracle and Larry Ellison, even as they make it harder for anyone else to make money. The pure capitalist will sell the rope used to hang himself. And Oracle will charge for the transactions.
By "most of the computing power", you must mean the RSX video chip. But the Cell CPU is fully accessible under Linux. And at 200GFLOPS, that's way more power than an x86 (or any other) PC has to offer. All under Linux, as several "cheap supercomputer" projects demonstrated.
It costs money to do everything. Some things, including used plastic, are worth money for sale. I expect there's some cost of recovery and delivery that's low enough that there'd be a profit in that huge mass of plastic.
I don't think the Pacific people need to be restricted to their traditional technology. Maybe that's letting my "political" stripes show.
And I don't see them exploiting a business opportunity as merely "garbage picking". I don't think you've been to a profitable recycling center. Or to the islands, either, where the poorest people usually do live in the trash discared by the riches, from castoff T-shirts to rubbish used as construction materials. Actually harvesting trash to sell back to industrialized countries on their own terms sounds a lot more like entrepreneurship than like "garbage picking" to me. But maybe that's the difference between our political stripes.
They don't have to sail the traditional vessels if other ones are better. I'm talking about the culture, and the people's attitude towards sailing out there. The method of collecting the trash effectively I leave to the collectors. I'm sure there's plenty of ways.
I'm sure there's local people there to figure out the details.
It seems to me that Pacific island nations with very low labor costs, high unemployment and a long tradition of seafaring should be able to find an economical way to round up that trash and recycle it for money.
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Microsoft didn't write all of Windows 7 from scratch. It's surely got plenty of "15 year old code", and probably older. So Microsoft's policy says that it cannot patch some Windows 7 bugs.
Maybe there indeed isn't any 15 year old code, as MS cycles its codebase slowly through "new" OS releases over the years. But there's doubtless 10 year old code, and certainly 5 year old code. So in 5-10 years, everyone buying Windows 7 today (and tomorrow) will be forced to buy the next "upgrade". And the one after.
Or run seriously insecure code that the bad guys have had 5, 10, 15 years to figure out how to exploit.
Microsoft: job security through product insecurity.
You're making an otherwise useful discussion difficult by portraying my argument as "ideology", starting out mocking it with childish imagery. You're the one who seems to think that any kind of business that isn't a vast war outside one's actual core business is unable to compete. Who thinks "change is scary" is a legitimate business value. Really that all sounds like you have some ideology you're applying here, not pragmatic business sense. If you'll stick to the actual arguments instead of the inaccurate labeling, we can keep discussing it.
I'm not talking about "peace and love"; I'm talking about inventors investing their money in investment and non-infringement - and in defending from overly broad patents that invite infringement. I've invented plenty of things, I've been part of business operations that have created patents, ranging from legit to bogus (for fake IP assets, for "defensive" protection, and for patent trolling, as well as to prevent the competition from harvesting the invention without the expense of inventing it). These weapons, as I've described, are extremely wasteful. And that strategy has the effect of locking out smaller players, more likely risktakers, from inventing, which is bad for progress. And progress isn't just something valuable we all depend on - it's what entrepreneurs sell, which includes me and most people in the economy I depend on.
I don't expect patent warriors to "lay down their weapons" all at once and unilaterally, even though they probably have a lot less to lose than they might fear, and a lot more to gain. Especially because the attitude you're presenting is indeed popular among global corporations, especially in technology (including medicine/chemistry). But having worked among plenty of those corps, embedded in their culture, I have seen how that approach is just yet another wasteful abuse that is entrenched among the less intellectually productive places, that is inferior in making profit. Which is why all I'm talking about here is the fallacy these "community patent defense" orgs are pushing, which should be among the first places to get onto a properly productive track. And patent law reform itself, which would deflate a lot of these fallacious arguments and defang a lot of these wasteful destructive strategies. Which is why I'm debating you here: so people reading can see the difference between sticking to the sensible original basis of the patent regime, applied to the current economics of the balance between rights and commerce.
If you want to debate the business and industrial economics, I'm interested. If you want some kind of culture war instead, you can keep it all for yourself to do with as you wish.
You're always going to need a lawyer when you're making money in business. But the cost of lawyers to defend yourself from infringement charges is a lot less than the cost to generate a portfolio of "defensive" patent counterattacks. Especially if you don't infringe, though even that can require paying lawyers to test your product against patented versions. Just a lot less than the army with a counterattack portfolio.
Patenting a flurry of inventions you will not exploit except to sue competitors over makes you weaker. To prevent chinks in the armor, you need a very large portfolio that never does you any good except when you're spending money being sued. If you just invest your money in promptly exploiting your inventions in the marketplace, you'll be much more focused on your core business, employ a lot fewer lawyers who produce nothing but invoices and complexity, and be more profitable. And make more progress.
Google. And a "public domain" registry into which orgs like these publish inventions, well indexed. PubPat is a nonprofit law org that works to get patents revoked, especially using prior art - I expect they have quite a good library and index. And I expect that there is a way to submit inventions to the PTO without patenting them, which gives the PTO the prior art that prevents future patents of that invention.
But I also expect that the PTO could use a much better index, and a better system to populate and search it. Because it seems to grant patents despite prior art all the time.
And if I can make it run without a display or WiFi, it will be perfect to surf the Psychic Friends Network.
I prefer my position. You're describing an escalating arms race that encourages patenting everything conceivable, just in case it might be used against some possible future infringement victim. Which means each infringement someone wants to get away with requires many "defensive" patents - that are really all offensive, to be traded in exchange for infringing. So those who can afford to play engage in constant patent warfare, while the cloud of shrapnel makes it too expensive for all but the largest players to play. Patents A and B might be legit, but C through 0xFFFFFFFF are created just to blast each other, creating nothing but destruction.
That is a hugely wasteful approach. Every legitimate patent for a useful invention gets paired with at least one bogus one that's never exploited to give anyone something they want, to neutralize its infringement suit. Every bogus patent requires lawyers and their support teams, as well as probably much more lawyer work on the useful patent it neutralizes. Overall a vast amount of work that produces nothing (except fat lawyers, looking for more trouble). And a lot of that worthless work is done in the courts, at public expense - subsidizing the rich players to spin their wheels.
And the fundamental use of patents, to protect progress, is mostly stifled by exactly the system justified only by its protective function, now neglected.
Instead, if patents are used according to their actual prescription in the Constitution, they will be used only to protect an investor's development investment long enough for them to attempt to exploit the invention in the market. Content and software inventions that benefit from the inverted economics that physical inventions do (mostly market saturation diminishing returns inverted into the network effect exponentializing them) wouldn't even be patentable, because that compromise is self-defeating. And physical ones would protect merely the specific mechanism, not the market niche a mechanism satisfies.
There's plenty of ways to corrupt a patent system. Its basis is rooted in a corrupt compromise of our rights to freely express ourselves. But since there's apparently a secret patent on the world of sunshine unicorns dancing amidst rainbow farts, such a compromise is still necessary. However, that compromise can now be much more minimal than even the original formulations back at the beginning of the Industrial Age, when Enlightenment Era legislators could already see the essential value in the most freely exchanged information. Instead we have a much more maximal regime steadily developed by exploiters of the Information Age in the Corporate Era. You advocate continuing that regime to its extreme, though it's already ruining us.
I prefer the simpler, legitimate minimization of synthetic government monopolies. I prefer progress and freedom to an endless firefight.
I don't understand your scenario. How is publishing an invention into the public domain going to be more limited in scope than a patent would be? How is the public domain prior art going to protect for unlimited exploitation any less than the patent would be?
If anything, the public domain can be more broadly illustrative than the patent would be. If these orgs dedicated their activity to cultivating the public domain, advising publishers into it for quality documentation the way they now do patents, the public domain would be easily invoked to dismiss any patent claim. Possibly (if the PTO were reformed to be a legit office) even easily used by patent examiners to nip invalid patents in the bud - rather than wait for a court, and then an appeals court, to determine the exclusions.
Public domain cannot be used to exclude implementation. Otherwise it has all the properties that a patent for defending implementation rights by anyone who wants them. Perhaps with the exception of a registry as accessible as the PTO library. But Google goes a long way towards that for the public domain, and one of these orgs could go the rest of the way by indexing the public prior art, perhaps even better than the PTO's patent registry.
And that kind of reversed momentum in the patent industry could enable reforming the patent industry. Once there's a sizeable interest in registering in the public domain rather than patents, there will be less unified defense of patents. And then the government can find alternatives to the patent industry for bribes and other lobbying utilities when redefining patents. Preferably to solely physical devices with a working model, solely for its unique mechanism (not its general purpose or result), for some time short enough for it to recoup its development investment but not long enough to exclude diversity of vendors for most of its useful market lifecycle. In other words, back to the minimal compromise necessary to allow inventors to recoup their investment when successful, without fearing competitors will start spending their own investment on selling it once the inventor has spent that amount giving it to them. In the content and software (and related, especially in the future) industries, that would eliminate patents (in favor of copyrights, which need their own parallel reform). And mechanical patents would restore sanity to economics in industries from drugs to paperclips. But only if there's an industry with a vested interest in not patenting, but otherwise protecting exploitation rights for everyone.
It's absurd only if you ignore the fact that the display I described has e-ink for only a "super low power B&W e-ink layer", and is mainly a "full color, high frame rate layer". The e-ink layer is only use in "e-reader" modes, which can be much lower power.
As for a "TV", try using your TV to read a PDF. On a train. Without a graphics chip, or a network to get the data.
The point is that we need not separate "netbooks" and "e-readers", but a single tablet that is just a display, renderer and wireless network node. But I guess until we get one in about 5 years, the future to you will just seem "absurd".
No, releasing an invention into the public domain negates any patent. If one has the right to do it, like if one holds the patent. Or if one just releases into the public domain instead of the long, costly and complex process of patenting.
Covenants not to sue can have wriggle room. And to be enforced, someone has to sue the party making the covenant. Public domain prevents suing much more effectively (though nothing is perfect protection from a frivolous lawyer) than any patent and covenant can be.
No, I have completely called BS on the need for a patent to do what "defensive patents" claim.
If the OIN (or anyone else) simply released all their patents into the public domain, then there would be completely clear defense for anyone using them without restriction - which is what "the point" is supposed to be. If the OIN wanted to also deliver legal advice or representation to people using something OIN put in the public domain, that would actually be useful to protect users of OIN's "portfolio".
The only reason to maintain a patent instead of just releasing into public domain is to exclude someone else from using what's patented. That is indeed the only difference between a patent and the public domain.
A patent doesn't put anything in the public domain. I think you just don't know what "public domain" means. It means there is no owner, no one can exert property rights in it, there's no legal way to exclude anyone from using it.
A patent is a registration that prohibits anyone else implementing what's patented. That's its entire point. Publishing it doesn't endanger that exclusive ownership, and lets everyone else know what they're excluded from implementing (unless they get a license from the patent holder).
I also think you don't really understand software patents, especially how Microsoft (and its ilk) use them to interfere with others competing with them, or even with interoperating with them.
Covenants not to sue are transient. You'd have to sue them to enforce it, which makes it useless to small operations.
Putting something in the public domain excludes patents or other restrictions on implementing it. That is what a serious inventor does when they want to protect "the community" ("the public") from interference in using something they invented, or even just that they did which might be subject to a patent later, but cannot because it's in the public domain instead.
All this talk of "defensive patents" that supposedly "protect the community" is just a fraud. To protect the community, take all the documentation of the patent, and put it in the public domain. Then, anyone who wants can implement the tech, without restriction, forever. Keeping it patented retains the power of the patent holder to deny implementation to someone, sometime.
If they were really serious about merely protecting the community, they'd give up the patent control entirely. But it's clear that "the" community just means whoever the patent holder wants to defend from someone else who they exclude. That's entirely against what the Linux way of real open development means: anyone, anytime can join the community by coding and releasing.
These "defensive" patent orgs will bite us in the ass. Otherwise they wouldn't be investing time and money in not just the patent portfolios and all the work to maintain them, but also in conning us into believing it's for our own good.
What we need is a tablet that has a superfast, hirez display, superfast wireless networking, and nearly nothing else. A wireless display peripheral at 1920x1080 (or, better yet, WQUXGA at 3840x1200) with a full color, high frame rate layer and a super low power B&W e-ink layer. A minimal CPU for running an X server's application and Linux - or some smaller "remote display" network OS and application. A 2-channel stereo soundchip. And a 600Mbps (DVI 552Mbps + 48Mbps data) that's 3x the speed of 802.11n.
The audio/video data delivered to it (and from it, as videophone, for a "deluxe" bidirectional media terminal) would be delivered by local feeds for home and conference use, or over really fast broadband. But the unit itself should be just a display (and recording) terminal, with app processing hosted at a stationary host.
So we've probably got at least 5 years before we get one of these. The display and networking bandwidth are higher than even the fastest desktop machines, with a few pioneering exceptions. By that time it should cost under $300. Until then, the rest are just prototypes.
The reason digital content is different from physical property is that, unless the content is unique private data, I don't care if someone else gets a copy. That is why digital content is better than physical matter.
These crooked engineers can make all the dishonest metaphors they want. But if we want to give away stuff for free, because we don't have any less when we give it - indeed we often have more, because we now have something in common with more people - then we're going to.
My fair use of a CD includes lending it to someone who plays it whenever they want, or playing it at a party for a bunch of strangers, even if I leave the room. That's protected by law, which mostly recognizes that copyright restrictions are exceptions to our free speech rights, and our rights to use our property however we wish (so long as it doesn't actually damage someone - and no, depriving them of a sales opportunity isn't damage). Copyright was a compromise with our rights back when it was sometimes necessary to promote the progress of science and useful arts". That compromise now backfires, holding back progress more than it promotes it, and the exclusive rights now exceed the "limited times" allowed by the Constitution.
They can reinvent digital handcuffs as often as they want. I won't buy them for myself.
Who's destroying a business? Oracle is just fine. Sun is no worse than it was before the merger announcement. This whole story is BS.
And there's no case here where a government agency "can't figure out how to prevent a monopoly". There's no reality to how you're depicting this situation.
And we do have to choose between destroying a business or letting it become a monopoly, the monopoly is the worse option. A new business will replace the destroyed one, as has happened every time a monopoly business has been destroyed (however rarely that has happened).
If it displeases environmentalists, it will be because it's still really bad for the environment. Using solar to preheat the water instead of more coal to preheat it just admits that solar is a more effective tech for generating energy than coal is. Any coal still burned is still polluting the Greenhouse, creating huge and unmanageable costs just a little down the road (and downwind, the typical "coal is clean" illusion).
They should just convert the entire plant to solar. But coal is too subsidized for them to abandon it, and its lobbyists have too tight a chokehold on the government for solar to have an equal shot at economic efficiency.
No, there's nothing stopping Sun from taking legitimate steps to protect itself, the same kind of commercial decisions and actions that it has always taken. The FTC doesn't stop a company from defending itself from market forces during a merger. Otherwise no large merger would ever happen in a competitive marketplace, because the merger's timeframe would indeed leave the company helpless. Sun isn't at all the first company in this position.
Obama's administration might not have fast tracked approval, but it did approve it very quickly, without evaluating issues like the MySQL risks that the EU has identified.
Capitol Hill protects and even mollycoddles the tech industry. In this case, it's shirking that responsibility. The EU is the one doing its due diligence to protect the market it's responsible for.
The feds (whether in the US or in the EU) are there to protect us from monopolies and other market abuse. Oracle merging with Sun substantially reduces consumer choices, and also threatens the viability of MySQL, which would be a substantial reduction in consumer choice.
"Fast track" means "declines to determine whether the market is threatened", AKA "shirks its obligation to protect the market".
How is Sun "unable to defend itself"? The whole point of this story is that the merger hasn't happened. So Sun is just as able to defend itself as before the attempt at merging was announced.
Besides, Oracle and Sun's directors know that mergers like the one with Sun take a long time, and are not guaranteed to be allowed. So that risk had to have been taken with this scenario in the math. If that could possibly hurt Sun's business in the meantime, that's Sun's fault - and Oracle's problem. Because if the merger goes through, they'll have paid full price for a damaged Sun. And if the merger fails, Sun will have been damaged for no benefit at all to Sun's shareholders, which the next target of an Oracle acquisition will rightly fear, making Oracle less able to acquire companies, which it must do to survive.
In any case, this whole article is BS. The EU antitrust division is taking longer not just to "bash American companies". The EU is concerned that MySQL will stop being a viable choice once it's owned by Oracle. That MySQL's open source community will no longer thrive once it's controlled by Oracle's execs instead of Sun's. That's a valid concern - that Obama's government just ignored when it immediately OK'd the deal.
The corporate mass media will spin this story any way it can to help kill anything about Sun that promoted freedom, choice and innovation. It worships Oracle and Larry Ellison, even as they make it harder for anyone else to make money. The pure capitalist will sell the rope used to hang himself. And Oracle will charge for the transactions.
By "most of the computing power", you must mean the RSX video chip. But the Cell CPU is fully accessible under Linux. And at 200GFLOPS, that's way more power than an x86 (or any other) PC has to offer. All under Linux, as several "cheap supercomputer" projects demonstrated.
It costs money to do everything. Some things, including used plastic, are worth money for sale. I expect there's some cost of recovery and delivery that's low enough that there'd be a profit in that huge mass of plastic.
I don't think the Pacific people need to be restricted to their traditional technology. Maybe that's letting my "political" stripes show.
And I don't see them exploiting a business opportunity as merely "garbage picking". I don't think you've been to a profitable recycling center. Or to the islands, either, where the poorest people usually do live in the trash discared by the riches, from castoff T-shirts to rubbish used as construction materials. Actually harvesting trash to sell back to industrialized countries on their own terms sounds a lot more like entrepreneurship than like "garbage picking" to me. But maybe that's the difference between our political stripes.
They don't have to sail the traditional vessels if other ones are better. I'm talking about the culture, and the people's attitude towards sailing out there. The method of collecting the trash effectively I leave to the collectors. I'm sure there's plenty of ways.
I'm sure there's local people there to figure out the details.
It seems to me that Pacific island nations with very low labor costs, high unemployment and a long tradition of seafaring should be able to find an economical way to round up that trash and recycle it for money.