It's abundantly clear that SCO's court case isn't going anywhere and this is a really poor investment. I agree that we should look for who is back-stoping the investment (as last time), because nobody in their right mind would make this investment expecting to make a profit. I don't think it's even worthwhile for FUD value any longer. We've essentially won this case already, there isn't really any going back.
It generally seems to be a point of relaxation in his speech: Richard lays down a pretty heavy political message, and then he gets to the point where he shows that he doesn't take himself so seriously that he can't put on a funny outfit and make some jokes. Not taking yourself too seriously is generally appreciated in a leader.
I have seen Richard do the St. iGNUtius thing many times, whenever we're both on the speaking program of a conference. It's always very clear that the audience realizes it's a joke. There's nobody in the audience not getting it and going Doh! I'm scared by this guy even if they've never seen him before.
I don't know if you are that humor-impaired, but I think you're wrong to expect that other folks would be.
So, what do you think would happen to FSF if RMS died? FSF has a full time director, a (small) board of directors, Eben Moglen as general counsel, some good leaders on the periphery like Brad Kuhn and Daniel Ravicher. We'd be sad, but it wouldn't end FSF.
There is no shortage of perjury cases against experts.
Really? I don't doubt what you say, I am just interested in the source of your information. That is something I would like to hear more about.
It's a big deal in Canada right now. See this article.
I would need to know more about what you consider to be the criteria of a "good example" of a patent before I could even hazard a guess about whether a "good" software patent could exist. However, I would have to wonder whether the criteria for "good" are specifically selected to exclude software due to personal biases.
Not trivial, not filed after the principle was obviously in use in the market.
The first paragraph of the parent was not specific to software patents.
You are asking for too much precision from a correspondent who is not used to arguing in a courtroom. The discussion here regarding patents is usually specific to software, and this discussion is specific to software.
Those same experts, having never seen the patent before, can talk themselves into the position put forward by the attorneys presenting the case.
I have a telephone lecture entitled you don't want me to write my report, and you don't want to ask why that I use for customers whose case my finding does not support. They appreciate hearing it that way, thank me, and pay my bill.
We are not talking about representations made to the patent office (although those can always be dealt with by invalidating the patent for fraud, which happens not-too-infrequently).
Yes, but where is the peril for the bad actor? They know they can lie on their application and never be charged.
Once again, the system isn't really designed to catch so-called "bad" applications at the PTO -- it is designed to have bad patents thrown out in court.
This is a full-employment act for patent attorneys, and unfortunately results in an abridgement of justice for the defendant. The last time I checked, the American Intellectual Property Law Association's Annual Economic Report was quoting USD$3 Million to USD$7 Million for defense in a single software patent case. For individuals and small or medium-sized enterprises, which make up the vast majority of the tech economy, there could only be a Phyrric victory because they'd exhaust their funds. Their only real choice is to settle under whatever terms the plaintiff offers.
Perjury before the court is not the domain of the patent office -- it is the domain of the court (and, if rising to a criminal level, the U.S. Attorney).
The patent application includes an oath explicitly under 18 USC 1001, the same law covering sworn testimony in court, which applies equally to matters in all three bodies of government. There are standing patents in which the claimed inventor can not have believed the matter was actually an invention. There are also patents in which documentation exists that the claimed inventor had knowledge of prior art not listed on the application. USPTO has standing to bring a case before the U.S. Attorney when such offenses happen, and yet does not. Nor have I heard of a court that after hearing an infringement case refers a case of perjury on the application for prosecution.
How can someone perjure themselves when giving an opinion?
There is no shortage of perjury cases against experts.
A strong argument could be made that the flaws in the patent system do more harm in the market for prescription drugs, where people literally die every day due to the artificial monopolies granted on life saving medicines they cannot afford.
Yes, the prescription drug system is broken, but with the current system only a patent monopoly provides the monetary incentive that can support getting over the FDA hurdle. The process of drug approval is front-loaded to the tune of about a Billion dollars. You need that much money before you start making a profit. Contrast it to software, in which the front-loading on the cost of development is the cost of a laptop and a developer's time - we're still seeing significant products coming out of individual developers and of course Open Source teams.
Now, consider the economics of production and competition of those two very different fields. Most businesses fail. Even when a business does not fail, most have different ideas. We're going to get the maximal delivery of innovation in software to the citizen if the most possible businesses are able to implement each algorithm. In contrast, we're not goi
This is a rhetorical strategy: Label your opponents as flamers and some folks will see them that way. Spare us, please.
The parent post to which I was responding suggested that all patents are ipso facto bad
He's commenting about a software patent. That's what the article is about. There are compelling arguments that software patents are a mistake.
However, I get a little weary of the "engineers are pure as driven snow" attitude.
The pure-as-snow ones don't become expert witnesses and are not generally asked to testify for the prosecution in an infringement case. However, given the last time the USPTO prosecuted a case of perjury on the application (1974, and the enforcement department no longer exists), it doesn't seem that there is any incentive for purity.
Patent and Trade secrets both seek to balance public good against personal gain
Yes, but we're back to the intent again. In the case of software patents, rather than a balance all of the incentives seem to be for the bad actor.
(2) Any company that thinks it can avoid a willful patent infringement claim by telling their engineers not to look at patents needs to question whether their corporate counsel is serving them or the other way around.
I'm not sure the counsel think that's all that needs to be done to protect the company, but it is standard direction for engineers in tech companies. I've had it at HP (internal counsel) Pixar (Wilson Sonsini, Larry Sonsini was our direct counsel) and it is at the standard at many companies.
I don't agree that patents are always longer than the current "generation of technology." Look at GIF, MP3, recalc etc.
GIF is a legacy technology and the specific patent, the Unisys - Terry Welch algorithm to preload tables in the Lempel-Ziv compressor, was arguably trivial and was far from the state of the art when it expired. MP3 seems to be encumbered by patents still in force but not from its inventors. If I understand what recalc you are taking about, I'd make a case it is trivial and pre-existed the patent.
What you wrote was the intent of the patent system, but not the reality. Engineers in tech companies are routinely told not to look at patents, because of the treble-damages problem or what I call the penalty for looking, damages three times as high for "knowing" infringement rather than unknowing. This makes the disclosure function of a patent inoperable. In addition, the claims of patents are written to capture as many possible applications as possible, even ones that had not been invented by the filer of the patent. This requires vagueness in the claims and further reduces the probability that they actually disclose anything of use. Indeed, the language generally used in patent claims is not particularly readable by engineers in the applicable discipline. One need only attempt to read a few patents for this to be clear. Thus, trade secret is not the antithesis of patent. A release of Open Source software is much closer to the antithesis of trade secret because it is a working and usually comprehensible implementation. Patents generally go hand-in-hand with closed-source software, and the source of that software is legally treated as a trade secret. Finally, in software, the duration of patents is so long compared to the duration of a generation of technology that there is no useful art remaining by the time the patent goes into the public domain.
There are lots of leftists who are successful advocates of their causes. And of course rightists and centrists too. The problem is more one of being able to put yourself in the shoes of your audience and then build a bridge from there to where you are. RMS can't do this for people who are very different from him.
I don't remember, but it was probably while I was Debian Project Leader. The archive doesn't go back that far. I do remember that I knew about Slashdot for months before I got a login. The 3872 number is only well-known because of the period when there were fake Bruces, more than one, on Slashdot. Tio Paco, uh, I mean Cmdr Taco was his usual unhelpful self. I had to make a point of telling folks that the "Real Bruce Perens" had that specific ID. This led to the Eminem parody.
The Berkeley System Distribution (BSD) had a long history before its derivatives NetBSD, FreeBSD, etc. I started with BSD in 1981 or 1982 at the NYIT Computer Graphics Lab, which was a predecessor of Pixar. Our lab had the first VAX 780 released outside of DEC. We put 4.0 BSD on it. At that time, you had to show UC a copy of your ATT Unix license before you could get a copy of BSD.
So, I agree that Richard is the wrong person to promote to business people. But having attended a number of St. iGNUtious performances, it's been really clear that his audience gets the joke. Although he has at times gotten food in his beard, there is no lack of bathing and no smell. I can't speak for how he was in 1982 at MIT, I was at another lab hundreds of miles away then.
IMO, for Richard the source of his genius is also an affliction. He can't help the way he is.
Some of the strategies are less comfortable (for us, for the companies that have the strategies, or for everyone in general) than others. Perhaps I should get a poor grade in grammar and the writer's control of tone. I didn't have much time to write this one, it got posted with little editing. I just came back from Europe on Wednesday. and of course much of my time since then has been spent on my 7-year-old.
About Apple: when I was leaving Pixar, I walked in to Steve's office and said "you still don't believe in this Linux thing?" He said "I've had a lot to do with two of the world's three great operating systems, and they each took a billion-dollar research lab to make." He meant NeXTStep and MacOS, which are now merged, and counted MS Windows as the third. He didn't think we'd be able to make a good GUI.
A couple of years later, Steve stood on the stage at MacWorld in front of a slide that said "Open Source: We Love It", as he introduced Safari, which of course was based on a KDE component. I won that argument.
I see some, thin and far between, references to "open source" before the announcement of the Open Source Definition. But IMO they didn't mean the same thing. They might have been referring to source code that was disclosed, but were not referring to the assurance that the software gave you a particular set of rights.
The date that I am talking about today is the anniversary of a campaign.
You and I don't have to choose between freedom of software and better software for users. It's OK to want both. It will sometimes be necessary to choose which of those we start the conversation with when approaching a prospective convert, and which one we leave for when we've won the argument about the first.
This is not so much about compromising ideals as it is about style of evangelism.
I think a good way to describe what I'm doing would be to say that I don't ask for everything that I want, becuase I wouldn't get much of it at all if I did. This does not mean that I've compromised any ideals.
Slashdot Mirror
Bruce
Same troll as before, different ID. Note how the times co-incide on each of them.
My audience is very adamant that I not feed the trolls, and thus I will leave this piece to steam on the grass by itself.
It generally seems to be a point of relaxation in his speech: Richard lays down a pretty heavy political message, and then he gets to the point where he shows that he doesn't take himself so seriously that he can't put on a funny outfit and make some jokes. Not taking yourself too seriously is generally appreciated in a leader.
I don't know if you are that humor-impaired, but I think you're wrong to expect that other folks would be.
Bruce
So, what do you think would happen to FSF if RMS died? FSF has a full time director, a (small) board of directors, Eben Moglen as general counsel, some good leaders on the periphery like Brad Kuhn and Daniel Ravicher. We'd be sad, but it wouldn't end FSF.
It's an overstatement to say he's no longer associated with OSI. He's listed on their site as an advisor and board observer.
I haven't seen that many TLAs in ALT.
You are asking for too much precision from a correspondent who is not used to arguing in a courtroom. The discussion here regarding patents is usually specific to software, and this discussion is specific to software.
I have a telephone lecture entitled you don't want me to write my report, and you don't want to ask why that I use for customers whose case my finding does not support. They appreciate hearing it that way, thank me, and pay my bill.
Yes, but where is the peril for the bad actor? They know they can lie on their application and never be charged.
This is a full-employment act for patent attorneys, and unfortunately results in an abridgement of justice for the defendant. The last time I checked, the American Intellectual Property Law Association's Annual Economic Report was quoting USD$3 Million to USD$7 Million for defense in a single software patent case. For individuals and small or medium-sized enterprises, which make up the vast majority of the tech economy, there could only be a Phyrric victory because they'd exhaust their funds. Their only real choice is to settle under whatever terms the plaintiff offers.
The patent application includes an oath explicitly under 18 USC 1001, the same law covering sworn testimony in court, which applies equally to matters in all three bodies of government. There are standing patents in which the claimed inventor can not have believed the matter was actually an invention. There are also patents in which documentation exists that the claimed inventor had knowledge of prior art not listed on the application. USPTO has standing to bring a case before the U.S. Attorney when such offenses happen, and yet does not. Nor have I heard of a court that after hearing an infringement case refers a case of perjury on the application for prosecution.
There is no shortage of perjury cases against experts.
Yes, the prescription drug system is broken, but with the current system only a patent monopoly provides the monetary incentive that can support getting over the FDA hurdle. The process of drug approval is front-loaded to the tune of about a Billion dollars. You need that much money before you start making a profit. Contrast it to software, in which the front-loading on the cost of development is the cost of a laptop and a developer's time - we're still seeing significant products coming out of individual developers and of course Open Source teams.
Now, consider the economics of production and competition of those two very different fields. Most businesses fail. Even when a business does not fail, most have different ideas. We're going to get the maximal delivery of innovation in software to the citizen if the most possible businesses are able to implement each algorithm. In contrast, we're not goi
Gee, what planet are you from? Obviously one without a constitution.
Bruce
Surely you must be aware of these issues.
Bruce
There are lots of leftists who are successful advocates of their causes. And of course rightists and centrists too. The problem is more one of being able to put yourself in the shoes of your audience and then build a bridge from there to where you are. RMS can't do this for people who are very different from him.
I don't remember, but it was probably while I was Debian Project Leader. The archive doesn't go back that far. I do remember that I knew about Slashdot for months before I got a login. The 3872 number is only well-known because of the period when there were fake Bruces, more than one, on Slashdot. Tio Paco, uh, I mean Cmdr Taco was his usual unhelpful self. I had to make a point of telling folks that the "Real Bruce Perens" had that specific ID. This led to the Eminem parody.
Bruce
IMO, for Richard the source of his genius is also an affliction. He can't help the way he is.
Bruce
About Apple: when I was leaving Pixar, I walked in to Steve's office and said "you still don't believe in this Linux thing?" He said "I've had a lot to do with two of the world's three great operating systems, and they each took a billion-dollar research lab to make." He meant NeXTStep and MacOS, which are now merged, and counted MS Windows as the third. He didn't think we'd be able to make a good GUI.
A couple of years later, Steve stood on the stage at MacWorld in front of a slide that said "Open Source: We Love It", as he introduced Safari, which of course was based on a KDE component. I won that argument.
Bruce
The date that I am talking about today is the anniversary of a campaign.
Bruce
That's fine. I hope you realize that your right to describe what your doing so freely is a rather delicate thing that needs protection.
Think again :-)
Talk with Peter Brown. FSF has a publicist who can help.
This is not so much about compromising ideals as it is about style of evangelism.
Thanks
Bruce
Did you read my economic paper? I really do make a point of talking about it in terms of free markets.
Bruce
I think a good way to describe what I'm doing would be to say that I don't ask for everything that I want, becuase I wouldn't get much of it at all if I did. This does not mean that I've compromised any ideals.