I think in scenarios like this an OSS alternative would be a no-brainer. Are there any OSS virtualization software suites in development right now (besides Wine)?
Actually, if you're a truly outstanding buggy whip maker, I bet you can make a living at it, even today. You've got your Amish, your historical re-enactors, your obsolete technology enthusiasts, your horse lovers... Ok, there is certainly nowhere near as large a market for buggy whip makers as there is for programmers or DB/2 admins, but I guarantee you, if you are the very best buggy whip maker in America today, you can make a living making buggy whips.
Thomas Jefferson did not write the Constitution. The actual text was written by a man named Gouverneur Morris. The ideas of course came from many sources, James Madison often being considered foremost among them. The Constitution was written between 1786 and 1787, and ratified by 1789. Jefferson was in France during this entire period, and did not directly participate in the creation of the Constitution. He was in fact somewhat skeptical of it, although he did eventually accept it. It does, of course, incorporate some of his ideas, which were well known at the time. But he can hardly be characterized as "The guy that wrote the Constitution of the US".
Dude, he's a teenager. The code I wrote at that age was similar. Worse, in fact, because it was the mid-80s, I had a C64, and I was hacking in BASIC. At least his code is neatly formatted...
The real thing I want to know is where will the jobs be that are not outsourced to other countries and why will they be the ones to stay in comparison to those that are sent overseas.
I think smaller companies are much less likely to offshore work than large companies. They lack the resources and the experience to know who they should hire in a far-away country and how they should monitor them to ensure that they're doing what they're supposed to be doing. They also lack the infrastructure to support widely distributed development environments. Big companies like IBM have been doing such things for years in many countries, so it's no big deal to add a few more new countries into the mix. So I predict that programming jobs in the US in the future will be more common in small companies that don't really know where or how to start with offshoring.
Plus, I suspect that companies will probably want to keep their "crown jewels" local. There was a recent news story about Microsoft sending some work to India, and their PR people responded a bit defensively, saying that their core windows/office development would always stay in the US.
Keep in mind that the psychological difference between something and nothing is much bigger than the psychological difference between something and a better something. Or put another way, technically the improvements made to aircraft between 1950 and 2000 are probably just as substantive if not more so than those made between 1900 and 1950, but it doesn't *seem* that way, because in the first period we went from not being able to fly to being able to do so, and no matter how much faster, higher, further, and more efficiently you can fly now, the difference will just never seem as great as that first leap when flight ocurred where there had been none before.
I think this applies to a lot of technologies in fact. The CD player is just as great a leap, technologically, over the record player as the initial invention of the record player was itself. But to the layman it doesn't seem so, because we already had recorded sound via the LP, so the idea didn't seem so new. The result was only incrementally better than what came before, even though the mechanism for getting there was fundamentally different.
I understand and sympathize with this idea, but I'm not sure it really works. Consider that if the length of the patent is shortened each time it changes hands, then its value is less to a potential purchaser. If the value is less to this potential purchaser, then the original owner/creator gets paid less for it, which reduces his incentive to create it in the first place.
You could argue that the creator should simply exploit it himself rather than sell it to others, but the fact of the matter is that not every inventor will be in a position to do that.
In short, your idea sounds like it would reduce, to some extent, this patent abuse, but it would not necessarily preserve the right of inventors to fair compensation for their inventions.
Slashdot Mirror
I think in scenarios like this an OSS alternative would be a no-brainer. Are there any OSS virtualization software suites in development right now (besides Wine)?
http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/
Actually, if you're a truly outstanding buggy whip maker, I bet you can make a living at it, even today. You've got your Amish, your historical re-enactors, your obsolete technology enthusiasts, your horse lovers... Ok, there is certainly nowhere near as large a market for buggy whip makers as there is for programmers or DB/2 admins, but I guarantee you, if you are the very best buggy whip maker in America today, you can make a living making buggy whips.
Thomas Jefferson did not write the Constitution. The actual text was written by a man named Gouverneur Morris. The ideas of course came from many sources, James Madison often being considered foremost among them. The Constitution was written between 1786 and 1787, and ratified by 1789. Jefferson was in France during this entire period, and did not directly participate in the creation of the Constitution. He was in fact somewhat skeptical of it, although he did eventually accept it. It does, of course, incorporate some of his ideas, which were well known at the time. But he can hardly be characterized as "The guy that wrote the Constitution of the US".
Dude, he's a teenager. The code I wrote at that age was similar. Worse, in fact, because it was the mid-80s, I had a C64, and I was hacking in BASIC. At least his code is neatly formatted...
Plus, I suspect that companies will probably want to keep their "crown jewels" local. There was a recent news story about Microsoft sending some work to India, and their PR people responded a bit defensively, saying that their core windows/office development would always stay in the US.
I think this applies to a lot of technologies in fact. The CD player is just as great a leap, technologically, over the record player as the initial invention of the record player was itself. But to the layman it doesn't seem so, because we already had recorded sound via the LP, so the idea didn't seem so new. The result was only incrementally better than what came before, even though the mechanism for getting there was fundamentally different.
I understand and sympathize with this idea, but I'm not sure it really works. Consider that if the length of the patent is shortened each time it changes hands, then its value is less to a potential purchaser. If the value is less to this potential purchaser, then the original owner/creator gets paid less for it, which reduces his incentive to create it in the first place.
You could argue that the creator should simply exploit it himself rather than sell it to others, but the fact of the matter is that not every inventor will be in a position to do that.
In short, your idea sounds like it would reduce, to some extent, this patent abuse, but it would not necessarily preserve the right of inventors to fair compensation for their inventions.