So Requirements Analysis, Feasibility Studies, Quality Assurance, Systems Design Documents, and so forth, are all offspring of the Open Source movement, and Open Source is the only entity which employs this 'level of documentation and planning'? Utter nonsense, folks.
Agreed.
One advantage that F/OSS volunteer projects do have over paid developer projects is that when "development process" starts down the waterfall of endless meetings and lack of productivity, the volunteer coder can more easily walk away, or even fork the project and do things differently. The key distinction is the word "volunteer" and the lesson for software companies is one that if they have any clue, they already know: don't use bad "process".
A good UI will take into account that there are probably two or three ways 95% of the users will want to perform a given task.
That's reasonable, and it fits my command line example, but it doesn't mean that ordinary everyday users won't need to consult a manual, and it leaves you right where you started from in the case of the other 5%. Their ignorance affects whether or not a program has a good UI according to your earlier definition, which you'll note I reject. That's why subjective definitions are generally bad. Fortunately there are non-subjective ways to measure user interfaces, which I'm sure you're aware of since you took a UI class 15 years ago.
You are willing instead to settle on something less but then still complain that users don't like your UI. Check Websters for the meaning of the word "contradiction."
I'm not complaining or settling for less, and I don't care what other people use.
You seem to have completely misinterpreted my post.
How is that possible?
You could be stupid, or tired, or not really paying attention, but I try to give people the benefit of the doubt (which is why I said "seem to".)
Yes, I'm directing sarcasm your way in an attempt to point out how hideously narrowminded you are about the entire subject of what constitutes "obvious".
Pardon me for giving too much credit to the reader.:)
Personally, I think it would be great if most people would grow a clue, learn how to read manuals and geek out about the same things that I do.
And that's where you fall down: you expect the person to adapt to fit the machine, not the other way around.
Read again: I explicitly said that I do not expect that to happen, and that I don't care that it doesn't always happen. But it did happen with me, successfully, so it does sometimes happen.
Fifteen years ago in college, my UI design prof said that the measure of a good user interface is one where the user can perform almost any function without the need to consult a manual.
This is an impossible ideal because users are different. Some require more hand-holding than others. Some are domain experts, while some are not (even Windows Solitaire requires consulting a manual if you don't know the rules.) Some are able to remember how they used the software yesterday, and some are not (I'm in the second category.) What your professor probably meant was that minimizing the need for the user to consult external documentation is generally desirable in a user interface.
Just because it's generally desirable, though, doesn't mean that it's required for a user interface to be considered "good". There are many factors that make a user interface "good" or "bad". Arguably, the CLI is a good user interface because it's so easy to learn: you have a command followed by some arguments. No sweat. Whether you need to consult a manual about the details of the command or its arguments depends on how good your memory is, how much you've used the command, how well-designed it is, etc. Sometimes there are interface requirements that are more important than the ability to use the program without consulting a manual.
You should have written "As I reflect back on my desktop transition from Windows to Linux, I see how F/OSS satisfied each of those requirements for me and anyone else who is an exact clone of me. I guess maybe it can succeed on the desktop for me and anyone else who is an exact clone of me."
Your rephrasing was unnecessary, because I indicated that the parts that you've added were true by using the pronoun "I". Did you think that I was claiming that F/OSS is capable of being all things to all people? No software can do that. It's intuitively obvious that the conditions you specified apply on a case-by-case basis. Different people have different requirements, after all.
Can you not see that what you're saying is no more correct than a rabid Windows user saying Windows is the best interface ever, that it does everything that he wants it to do, just as he wants it, therefore it's the best for everyone?
You seem to have completely misinterpreted my post. Reread the part where I said "I don't care what other people use." Yes, I do happen to think that my distribution of choice is good enough for a power user or for an ordinary user with sysadmin support to use on the desktop, just as I think that Windows is good enough for a power user or for an ordinary user with sysadmin support to use on the desktop. This is in no way equivalent to "it works for me, therefore it's the best for everyone." To be honest, I might consider switching back to Windows again someday if MS ever manages to compete with Linux's license; the XLiveCD makes it quite usable.
Though, I do care about the choices of others to the extent that they impact me. If the majority of users eventually standardize on game console-like DRM-locked computers, I might not be able to purchase the kind of computer that I want to use. That would be unfortunate.
I've never heard it put better than how you just put it. You've just summed up the prime reason why the tech-head geeks never, ever get "their" way by being bull headed about things. You cannot force people to like what you like just because you like its technical elegance. Pity that most F/OSS people cannot figure that out.
It's not that they can't figure it out, it's that "they" are different people. There are those who care about getting market share, and there are those who don't care if clueless people share their software preferences or not. The two groups do not overlap.
Personally, I think it would be great if most people would grow a clue, learn how to read manuals and geek out about the same things that I do. (For one thing it wouldn't be hard to find a Battletech game going on somewhere.) But that's not going to happen.
Getting users to adopt new software (such as desktop Linux) is really much simpler than you might think. You must do the following:
1. Provide a seamless (or near seamless) transition. This means the user interfaces between the old and the new must be as similar is possible. Or, if the old interface was a godawful nightmare, the new one must be uber-intuitive...
2. Provide the features users use...
3. Give the users a reason to change...
If F/OSS can satisfy these three points, there's no reason why it can't succeed on the desktop.
That's a great list. As I reflect back on my desktop transition from Windows to Linux, I see how F/OSS satisfied each of those requirements. I guess maybe it can succeed on the desktop... but I don't care, because I'm in the second group.
You will find how sorely you need public education to keep young men running around, forming gangs, and terrorizing everyone.
Public education is neither necessary nor sufficient to keep young men from running around, forming gangs and terrorizing people. Some places with public education have that activity, and some places without it do not. If there is any negative correlation between the presence of public education and the formation of gang activity, please share some evidence of it.
I love how these civil libertarians say nobody needs taxes, yet they stay far clear of headhunter tribes or civil war zones.
That's crazy talk. There are good reasons for staying away from headhunter tribes and civil war zones. Your suggestion that headhunter tribes and civil war zones are a necessary result of minimal government is absurd.
The libertarian (not civil libertarian; look up the difference) position on taxes is that they should be lower because government should do less stuff. That's a far cry from anarchy.
You live in the lap of luxury, plainly due to the fact of taxes and our civil institutions
Libertarians object to excessive taxation, which has a negative effect on our quality of life. Some of our civil institutions are good, and some of them are unnecessary, wasteful and actively harmful to society. Dumping money down a hole only helps your quality of life if you own the hole (and guess what, you don't.)
The majority of American's wouldn't support a conservative agenda on the environment, healthcare, and corporate welfare
That depends which "conservative" agendas you're talking about. I consider myself to be conservative, and I think that improving the environment by associating the cost of pollution with polluters, bringing health care costs under control by eliminating unnecessary coverage and reducing taxes by eliminating corporate welfare would not necessarily be opposed by the majority of Americans. (Well, maybe the second one; it seems like people all want something for nothing.)
Don't fall for the trap that Republican = conservative (or even worse, that Democrat = liberal). In order to do well in modern politics, you need to leave your ideals at the door.
The Asus A8N-VM CSM motherboard has an onboard DVI-D connector (in addition to its onboard VGA connector.) I'm not sure why they did it that way; is it cheaper? More suitable to HTPC use?
What about those who dismiss his philanthropy by saying that it doesn't mean as much when he's still got billions left?
Rumor has it that he does intend to give all of it away before he dies; if he does indeed do so, the people making the above argument will need another one.
Next time, try reading your own post, especially the part that I've conveniently quoted. You claimed that "the stuff people typically do in Excel or Word" is something that can't be done from a command line. "Stuff people typically do in Excel or Word" *is* something that can be done from a command line: issue the "[programname] [documentname]" command. The post you refer to is also incorrect: drawing and photo retouching can be done from the command line in the same way that editing Word or Excel documents can, by running a program that does those things.
When someone asks "Just what is the command line not suited for," the literal answer "anything other than running programs" misses the point. The question, in the context of "the command line sucks! no it doesn't!" discussions, is "what kinds of programs are not suited to being launched from a command line, that are suited to be launched by an alternative (such as a gui or dwim button)?" The flip side is the question "what kinds of programs are better suited to being called from a command line than from another kind of interface?"
How about "actual work"? You know, the stuff people typically do in Excel or Word.
Yes, Word sucks, but it sure beats writing a typical document from the command line.
The command line is not for writing documents, it is for issuing commands, one of which might be "word". Word doesn't issue commands, so using word is not an alternative to using a command line; every day I edit documents using commands like "[programname] [documentname]". In fact, it's what I should be doing now, instead of reading slashdot.
You seem to have interpreted my post as being anti-hunting. Nothing could be farther from the truth: unnecessary cruelty to animals is bad, but hunting is not necessarily cruel, and as you point out, hunting is often an essential aspect of herd management in this day and age.
Hunting can be a lot of fun, and I see no need to invent silly reasons like "I'm hunting for food, der hey"[0] to justify it. Many hunters[1] think they need to, though.
[0] By saying "der hey" I'm making fun of my own regional subculture, where deer season is more about getting drunk and playing with guns with your buddies than it is about shooting deer.
[1] I admit I should have said "many hunters" instead of "hunters" in the post that you quoted.
With electronic data, longevity is measured in terms of data format and management, not device hardware. My e-books (all by Baen as it happens) are stored electronically in open formats on my server and backed up regularly. My book reading devices will eventually fail or be replaced, but if I manage my data properly it will still be around in 100 years.
All that being said, e-books will probably never be able to provide the wall decoration that rows upon rows of dead tree bookshelves provide. I enjoy having a library.
You might try distinguishing between "Want to eat" and "Need to eat" in your ethics. If I "Want" to eat a blue whale, say to see how it tastes, that doesn't necessarily make it a sound and ethical decision to go off killing such a large and rare beast.
I believe that hunters purposely avoid making that distinction because they enjoy hunting for sport, but they want to distinguish themselves from the non-politically-correct hunters of yesteryear who hunted for the sake of hunting and then wasted the kill. They rationalize "Well, I'm going to eat the animal, so it's ok for me to hunt it even though it would be easier for me to go to the supermarket and buy food."
I don't think the three simple ethical rationalizations are intended to support killing endangered species either, and there are in fact additional ethical reasons to hunt animals (two are "to keep the herd small enough to avoid starvation" and "to prevent the spread of disease".)
Even the most ecologically correct American liberal lives a life of unparalleled luxury and ease, fueled by cheap energy, and uses up the Earth's resources by orders of magnitude more than an African villager.
The problem isn't that the first world uses up too many resources, it's that the third world is not yet able to achieve our standard of living. We should not punish ourselves for not living like that villager. Instead, we should promote conditions that allow villagers to lift themselves to their desired standard of living. (Remember, standard of living is a lot more than transportation; it also includes things like life expectancy and infant mortality.)
This is a good point that I think is often overlooked. I like to define faith as the axioms of one's belief system. Do you believe (as I do) that logic is valid, despite the fact that it's unprovable? We choose to believe it, based on our life experiences. We have faith.
the problem is that patents are too easy to get. The bar for non-obviousness is intolerably low.
A solution to that might be to have non-willful infringement be grounds for invalidating a patent, on the basis that the patent wasn't as non-obvious as originally thought.
I'm still confused about how something that I can hold in my hand is an idea, not a physical object.
You can hold a CD in your hand. Does that make software a physical object?
No, but it makes that CD a physical object. I can touch an electronic circuit with a stick. It's a physical object.
I fail to see why algorithms are necessarily easier or faster to copy than mechanical gadgets.
Algorithms can be stored in electronic form. Things stored electronically are necessarily easier and faster to copy than mechanical gadgets. They can be emailed, ftp'd, copied with the "copy" command, etc., using technology that is cheap and widely available (personal computers). The closest that a mechanical gadget copying process can come to that is mass production, which is much more limited and expensive.
Software patents limit this forward progress to the patentholder, slowing everyone else and hurting the economy.
Well, you can always pony up the cash and license the patent.
Not necessarily. One of the reasons for the pace of software development is the low barrier to entry: a $300 computer plus an internet connection is all you need to start writing software. Many developers can't afford to license a single patent, and there are many patents.
The theory is that it accelerates progress, because innovation is rewarded. Why is this untrue for software and true for other industries?
Maybe it's not. Can you demonstrate that it's true for other industries? Many rewards for innovation already exist, and it seems reasonable that there could be many fields where patents (even of mechanical gadgets) hold up progress rather than accelerating it.
No extra promotion of progress is needed in the world of software; companies and individuals are busy racing forward as quickly as they can.
This is true of many industries. Competition from overseas is another major driver. In general, there is plenty of motivation besides patents.
Sounds like a good reason to investigate whether any patents are worthwhile.
The real problem is the horrible job the USPTO does approving patents, not patents themselves.
The fact that the USPTO is not capable of competently administering the patent system is by itself sufficient reason to eliminate patents.
One of the biggest problems with the patent system is that it punishes parallel development. If two people "invent" the same thing independently, then it's too obvious to have been issued a patent in the first place. Non-willful patent infringement, therefore, should be grounds for invalidating a patent.
OK, I might not have been too clear. Let's say you design a new type of amplifier that has better performance than an existing one. It's certainly patentable, and it's just an idea. Just because you might implement it with transistors instead of bits doesn't mean it's substantially different.
I'm still confused about how something that I can hold in my hand is an idea, not a physical object.
For a variety of reasons, patents on algorithms impede progress and economic growth; they do not produce a net benefit to society, so they should not be granted.
You have not presented a shred of evidence to support your assertion.
Correct. I left that for a followup post, in case there's someone to whom it is not self-evident. I will avoid discussing whether or not any of these things are true for patents on mechanical gadgets; in some cases they might be, but in some they aren't, and I'm not arguing for the abolition of all patents at this time (though I'm open to the idea). Do you agree, though, that if my assertion is correct, patents on algorithms should not be granted?
Algorithms, being nonphysical, are able to be copied much more quickly and at much lower cost than mechanical gadgets. This has led to a computer software industry that is racing forward at incredible speed. The rate of development of new and better software is high, which brings tremendous economic benefits. Software patents limit this forward progress to the patentholder, slowing everyone else and hurting the economy. Since nobody holds all patents, everybody is slowed.
Patents were created to reduce trade secrets, but the ultimate goal is to promote progress. No extra promotion of progress is needed in the world of software; companies and individuals are busy racing forward as quickly as they can. Software patent holders would not pack up their bags and go home if software patents were eliminated; instead they would innovate even faster than before, in order to capitalize on their development investment.
The USPTO appears unable to limit software patent grants to good software inventions. As a result, we are flooded with bad software patents covering common or obvious techniques. These are used to slow down industry progress even more. It's difficult to write a nontrivial program without infringing on some patent somewhere; what saves forward progress at all is the sheer difficulty of sifting through the billions of lines of code and finding suitable targets to sue, in conjunction with developers who ignore software patents entirely and simply write code, hoping not to be sued.
Because of the plethora of bad patents, there is much litigation that would not otherwise exist. This wastes lots of money and ties up the courts. These extra costs are a burden on the industry and on society.
If patents on algorithms do not benefit society, how do patents on mechanical gadgets benefit society?
It's very possible that they no longer do. Back in the day, maybe they did, but today, there are lots of bad patents on mechanical gadgets too. Today they're used by big companies to hold back the little guy and each other. I don't think that's beneficial to society, though it's much less clear in the case of mechanical gadgets than of algorithms. Being in the business of algorithms myself, I see their bad effects more than I see the bad effects of patents on mechanical gadgets.
There isn't some kind of magical dividing line.
There is, in fact: physical objects are much more difficult and expensive to copy than ideas.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed.
One advantage that F/OSS volunteer projects do have over paid developer projects is that when "development process" starts down the waterfall of endless meetings and lack of productivity, the volunteer coder can more easily walk away, or even fork the project and do things differently. The key distinction is the word "volunteer" and the lesson for software companies is one that if they have any clue, they already know: don't use bad "process".
That's reasonable, and it fits my command line example, but it doesn't mean that ordinary everyday users won't need to consult a manual, and it leaves you right where you started from in the case of the other 5%. Their ignorance affects whether or not a program has a good UI according to your earlier definition, which you'll note I reject. That's why subjective definitions are generally bad. Fortunately there are non-subjective ways to measure user interfaces, which I'm sure you're aware of since you took a UI class 15 years ago.
I'm not complaining or settling for less, and I don't care what other people use.
You could be stupid, or tired, or not really paying attention, but I try to give people the benefit of the doubt (which is why I said "seem to".)
Pardon me for giving too much credit to the reader. :)
Yes, so that people realize there's nothing wrong with port scanning.
I think ethics courses are great, as long as it's my ethics that are being taught.
That's not going to get the students very far. Are there any public domain security tools?
Read again: I explicitly said that I do not expect that to happen, and that I don't care that it doesn't always happen. But it did happen with me, successfully, so it does sometimes happen.
This is an impossible ideal because users are different. Some require more hand-holding than others. Some are domain experts, while some are not (even Windows Solitaire requires consulting a manual if you don't know the rules.) Some are able to remember how they used the software yesterday, and some are not (I'm in the second category.) What your professor probably meant was that minimizing the need for the user to consult external documentation is generally desirable in a user interface.
Just because it's generally desirable, though, doesn't mean that it's required for a user interface to be considered "good". There are many factors that make a user interface "good" or "bad". Arguably, the CLI is a good user interface because it's so easy to learn: you have a command followed by some arguments. No sweat. Whether you need to consult a manual about the details of the command or its arguments depends on how good your memory is, how much you've used the command, how well-designed it is, etc. Sometimes there are interface requirements that are more important than the ability to use the program without consulting a manual.
Your rephrasing was unnecessary, because I indicated that the parts that you've added were true by using the pronoun "I". Did you think that I was claiming that F/OSS is capable of being all things to all people? No software can do that. It's intuitively obvious that the conditions you specified apply on a case-by-case basis. Different people have different requirements, after all.
You seem to have completely misinterpreted my post. Reread the part where I said "I don't care what other people use." Yes, I do happen to think that my distribution of choice is good enough for a power user or for an ordinary user with sysadmin support to use on the desktop, just as I think that Windows is good enough for a power user or for an ordinary user with sysadmin support to use on the desktop. This is in no way equivalent to "it works for me, therefore it's the best for everyone." To be honest, I might consider switching back to Windows again someday if MS ever manages to compete with Linux's license; the XLiveCD makes it quite usable.
Though, I do care about the choices of others to the extent that they impact me. If the majority of users eventually standardize on game console-like DRM-locked computers, I might not be able to purchase the kind of computer that I want to use. That would be unfortunate.
It's not that they can't figure it out, it's that "they" are different people. There are those who care about getting market share, and there are those who don't care if clueless people share their software preferences or not. The two groups do not overlap.
Personally, I think it would be great if most people would grow a clue, learn how to read manuals and geek out about the same things that I do. (For one thing it wouldn't be hard to find a Battletech game going on somewhere.) But that's not going to happen.
That's a great list. As I reflect back on my desktop transition from Windows to Linux, I see how F/OSS satisfied each of those requirements. I guess maybe it can succeed on the desktop... but I don't care, because I'm in the second group.
Public education is neither necessary nor sufficient to keep young men from running around, forming gangs and terrorizing people. Some places with public education have that activity, and some places without it do not. If there is any negative correlation between the presence of public education and the formation of gang activity, please share some evidence of it.
That's crazy talk. There are good reasons for staying away from headhunter tribes and civil war zones. Your suggestion that headhunter tribes and civil war zones are a necessary result of minimal government is absurd.
The libertarian (not civil libertarian; look up the difference) position on taxes is that they should be lower because government should do less stuff. That's a far cry from anarchy.
Libertarians object to excessive taxation, which has a negative effect on our quality of life. Some of our civil institutions are good, and some of them are unnecessary, wasteful and actively harmful to society. Dumping money down a hole only helps your quality of life if you own the hole (and guess what, you don't.)
That depends which "conservative" agendas you're talking about. I consider myself to be conservative, and I think that improving the environment by associating the cost of pollution with polluters, bringing health care costs under control by eliminating unnecessary coverage and reducing taxes by eliminating corporate welfare would not necessarily be opposed by the majority of Americans. (Well, maybe the second one; it seems like people all want something for nothing.)
Don't fall for the trap that Republican = conservative (or even worse, that Democrat = liberal). In order to do well in modern politics, you need to leave your ideals at the door.
The Asus A8N-VM CSM motherboard has an onboard DVI-D connector (in addition to its onboard VGA connector.) I'm not sure why they did it that way; is it cheaper? More suitable to HTPC use?
Rumor has it that he does intend to give all of it away before he dies; if he does indeed do so, the people making the above argument will need another one.
When someone asks "Just what is the command line not suited for," the literal answer "anything other than running programs" misses the point. The question, in the context of "the command line sucks! no it doesn't!" discussions, is "what kinds of programs are not suited to being launched from a command line, that are suited to be launched by an alternative (such as a gui or dwim button)?" The flip side is the question "what kinds of programs are better suited to being called from a command line than from another kind of interface?"
The command line is not for writing documents, it is for issuing commands, one of which might be "word". Word doesn't issue commands, so using word is not an alternative to using a command line; every day I edit documents using commands like "[programname] [documentname]". In fact, it's what I should be doing now, instead of reading slashdot.
Hunting can be a lot of fun, and I see no need to invent silly reasons like "I'm hunting for food, der hey"[0] to justify it. Many hunters[1] think they need to, though.
[0] By saying "der hey" I'm making fun of my own regional subculture, where deer season is more about getting drunk and playing with guns with your buddies than it is about shooting deer.
[1] I admit I should have said "many hunters" instead of "hunters" in the post that you quoted.
All that being said, e-books will probably never be able to provide the wall decoration that rows upon rows of dead tree bookshelves provide. I enjoy having a library.
Oops... strike that. It's what I get for posting without caffeine.
I believe that hunters purposely avoid making that distinction because they enjoy hunting for sport, but they want to distinguish themselves from the non-politically-correct hunters of yesteryear who hunted for the sake of hunting and then wasted the kill. They rationalize "Well, I'm going to eat the animal, so it's ok for me to hunt it even though it would be easier for me to go to the supermarket and buy food."
I don't think the three simple ethical rationalizations are intended to support killing endangered species either, and there are in fact additional ethical reasons to hunt animals (two are "to keep the herd small enough to avoid starvation" and "to prevent the spread of disease".)
And when that day comes, if it ever does, there will be great rejoicing.
Sounds like a government mandate just waiting to happen. Won't somebody think of the children?
The problem isn't that the first world uses up too many resources, it's that the third world is not yet able to achieve our standard of living. We should not punish ourselves for not living like that villager. Instead, we should promote conditions that allow villagers to lift themselves to their desired standard of living. (Remember, standard of living is a lot more than transportation; it also includes things like life expectancy and infant mortality.)
This is a good point that I think is often overlooked. I like to define faith as the axioms of one's belief system. Do you believe (as I do) that logic is valid, despite the fact that it's unprovable? We choose to believe it, based on our life experiences. We have faith.
That's a fair assessment, since everybody everywhere is stupid.
A solution to that might be to have non-willful infringement be grounds for invalidating a patent, on the basis that the patent wasn't as non-obvious as originally thought.
No, but it makes that CD a physical object. I can touch an electronic circuit with a stick. It's a physical object.
Algorithms can be stored in electronic form. Things stored electronically are necessarily easier and faster to copy than mechanical gadgets. They can be emailed, ftp'd, copied with the "copy" command, etc., using technology that is cheap and widely available (personal computers). The closest that a mechanical gadget copying process can come to that is mass production, which is much more limited and expensive.
Not necessarily. One of the reasons for the pace of software development is the low barrier to entry: a $300 computer plus an internet connection is all you need to start writing software. Many developers can't afford to license a single patent, and there are many patents.
Maybe it's not. Can you demonstrate that it's true for other industries? Many rewards for innovation already exist, and it seems reasonable that there could be many fields where patents (even of mechanical gadgets) hold up progress rather than accelerating it.
Sounds like a good reason to investigate whether any patents are worthwhile.
The fact that the USPTO is not capable of competently administering the patent system is by itself sufficient reason to eliminate patents.
One of the biggest problems with the patent system is that it punishes parallel development. If two people "invent" the same thing independently, then it's too obvious to have been issued a patent in the first place. Non-willful patent infringement, therefore, should be grounds for invalidating a patent.
I'm still confused about how something that I can hold in my hand is an idea, not a physical object.
Correct. I left that for a followup post, in case there's someone to whom it is not self-evident. I will avoid discussing whether or not any of these things are true for patents on mechanical gadgets; in some cases they might be, but in some they aren't, and I'm not arguing for the abolition of all patents at this time (though I'm open to the idea). Do you agree, though, that if my assertion is correct, patents on algorithms should not be granted?
Algorithms, being nonphysical, are able to be copied much more quickly and at much lower cost than mechanical gadgets. This has led to a computer software industry that is racing forward at incredible speed. The rate of development of new and better software is high, which brings tremendous economic benefits. Software patents limit this forward progress to the patentholder, slowing everyone else and hurting the economy. Since nobody holds all patents, everybody is slowed.
Patents were created to reduce trade secrets, but the ultimate goal is to promote progress. No extra promotion of progress is needed in the world of software; companies and individuals are busy racing forward as quickly as they can. Software patent holders would not pack up their bags and go home if software patents were eliminated; instead they would innovate even faster than before, in order to capitalize on their development investment.
The USPTO appears unable to limit software patent grants to good software inventions. As a result, we are flooded with bad software patents covering common or obvious techniques. These are used to slow down industry progress even more. It's difficult to write a nontrivial program without infringing on some patent somewhere; what saves forward progress at all is the sheer difficulty of sifting through the billions of lines of code and finding suitable targets to sue, in conjunction with developers who ignore software patents entirely and simply write code, hoping not to be sued.
Because of the plethora of bad patents, there is much litigation that would not otherwise exist. This wastes lots of money and ties up the courts. These extra costs are a burden on the industry and on society.
It's very possible that they no longer do. Back in the day, maybe they did, but today, there are lots of bad patents on mechanical gadgets too. Today they're used by big companies to hold back the little guy and each other. I don't think that's beneficial to society, though it's much less clear in the case of mechanical gadgets than of algorithms. Being in the business of algorithms myself, I see their bad effects more than I see the bad effects of patents on mechanical gadgets.
There is, in fact: physical objects are much more difficult and expensive to copy than ideas.
No offense, but you keep avoiding the question. In your opinion, is a distribution required to rename every trademarked program?