Well he can put me down as a Linux user who jumped onto OSX.
I went from using Linux on my main box to using an Apple as my main too, but the resemblence ends there.
I use the Apple because I have to have a few proprietary programs that don't have Linux versions. It was Apple or XP, and Apple wins that comparison hands down.
But I strongly disagree that it beats Linux, for my purposes, outside of that constraint.
OSX (I'm typing this in it now) is better in a lot of ways, don't get me wrong. It's great to have a real command line - but the typical Mac user will never use it. It's great to have multitasking, and a real stable OS, that's for sure. The technical underpinnings of OSX are far superior to Classic.
But, if you look at the traditional Mac audience, the folks that have been their loyal customers all these years, the thing that's most important to them is a really well designed and stable GUI. Stable in the sense of not changing needlessly and causing confusion between revisions, not in the sense of not crashing. Classic does crash enough to be a mild PITA, but it was the most stable thing around so far as the GUI is concerned.
And this is the one area where OSX is a step backwards. Apple has fallen for what we could call the Microsoft syndrome, fallen in love with flashy graphics at the expense of a clean UI, and it shows. It's not as bad as XP, no, and that's fortunate for Apple, because otherwise they'd be losing a lot of those old loyal customers. As it is, instead of jumping platform, they're resisting upgrading. Because the GUI just isn't as good. Everything else is a lot better, but we're talking about people for whom the GUI is critical.
I really hope Apple comes to their sense and, if they won't roll back the GUI (I don't have a shadow of a hope that they will) by default at least have an option for the user to do so.
Hmm, maybe we had 'reveal codes' turned on by default...
Very likely the case. I remember for a little while I was the only person that did that, then our secretary asked me about that wierd window at the bottom of my screen, and I explained it and showed how I kept it open so I knew exactly what I was selecting, where I put attributes and the like... a couple weeks later I noticed that everyone in the office had switched it on.
I had the misfortune to be required to learn WordPerfect for DOS, which was still an non-WYSIWYG word processor. And guess what. If you wanted to make text bold, you had to insert a special 'bold' code (using some key combination I can't remember) and then at the end of the bold text, enter an 'end bold' code, similarly to using <b> in HTML.
I used WP from version 4 through 6, and that's not how I remember it. You just selected the text and then selected bold if memory serves, like most word processors. Of course the tag soup you're talking about was hiding back there, and even in this situation where you don't have to worry about another program trying to parse the thing this is bad - it can cause all sorts of strange little problems, like for instance if you delete the text but not the spaces around it, and the spaces were inside the bold tags, then later you put your cursor in those spaces and start typing - wtf is that bold?!?!? The beautiful thing with WP though, unlike Word, was you could 'reveal codes' and figure these things out.
I preferred at the time to do my text in a real editor, then mark it up when it was ready and print it out with Ventura - but some things we did had to be electronically submitted in WP or Word, and WP was always a hell of a lot better than Word.
Anyway, although I disagree that "valid and semantically correct HTML wasn't even considered by anyone" - there are far too many self-described web designers that fit that bill, and were even in the early days, although it's my impression that's gotten worse, not better. Other than that, I agree with pretty much all you said. I think you're exactly right on the mechanics that cause the tag soup, and the mechanics of how a decent WYSIWYG editor could go about cleaning it up.
Perhaps they develope military technologies BECAUSE they aren't popular and perhaps they aren't popular BECAUSE they're the only democracy in the middle-east AND they've been at odds with the Arabs for the past several thousand years.
If by "they" you mean Jews, you're wrong. It was Europe where they were at odds for thousands of years, the Muslim world was a relative safe haven for Jews until very recently.
If by "they" you mean the Israeli government, it's existed for decades, not thousands of years.
And, of course, the fact that "they" are unpopular with the Arab world at the moment couldn't have anything to do with the occupation, land grabbing, apartheid system, and open aspirations of ethnic cleansing of the Israeli government, which pretends to speak for Jews as a whole even though many disagree wholeheartedly with its policies. That would be far too obvious.
But if this thing is a real Frontpage work-alike, it's going to spit out horrid broken code almost as bad as Word anyway, that's the biggest worry I would have.
I do simply html in notepad/textedit whatever, and use Emacs with html and php syntax highlighting when I need more, so the holy war aside we basically agree on that, and although I think Emacs is infinitely more newbie friendly than VI, it's still obviously not something I could expect my mom to sit down and start coding pages in. So yes, something like this could be good. But every implementation of this idea I've seen yet spits out horrible broken code and there are reasons for that, so I'm a bit skeptical too.
You obviously hold yourself to be the expert in that area, and I'm not going to dispute that. I question whether I should even bother going further, because I doubt you'll pay any mind to ideas that contradict your own in your field of expertise, but on the off chance that you do, I'll point out that science and engineering made great progress before the patent system ever existed, and continued to make progress in many countries that didn't have patents long after that point. I think your argument is deeply rooted in fact, but also in missing the point in a way. Obviously, without all the features of the current situation, the current business model would not work as it does. This doesn't mean no business model would be possible, let alone that progress would suddenly come to a halt.
First, as to the patents, that's really a very long complicated argument you want to get into that I quite simply don't have time to cover fully today, or any day soon. I'll try, but it will inevitably be merely a teaser, because I just don't have time to write a full thesis on the subject now. This is not my page and I may disagree on some details, but it's a start. If you read other posts in this thread there is one that discusses the importance of not enforcing patents to the progress of the industrial revolution in the US and Germany, and if you do a little research you will find that Holland and Switzerland in their economic heyday are similar stories.
At any rate, let's keep in mind that 'IP' is more than just patents, copyrights, and trade secrets - it's the combination of those conflated with property.
This last is a very recent phenomenon, and has lead to the excessive measures even reasonable proponents of patent and copyrights decry. That's the most important point I suppose - that these things are not property, they are privelege in the original sense.
Now beyond that, I have no problem with trade secrets at all, and I think that most everything good that could come from patents could be achieved in that way, without the violation of real property implied in a patent regime of any kind. Given that patents prohibit independent invention and prevent people from peacefully and honestly using their own property in any implementation I find them very hard to defend. And I think the notion that people would quit inventing without them is ludicrous. People invent for a great number of reasons, getting rich off patents is only one of them. Without a patent regime, an inventor who invents only for money (likely, in my opinion, to be not the most important subset, but be that as it may) will still have a profit motive, the difference will be simply in the details of how to get from A to B - rather than rushing to file a patent before anyone else, he would instead work to produce and sell actual product before anyone else, to take and maintain an early lead in the field through trade secrets and continual research and refinement. I think it is plausible that this would result in more, not less, invention. And even if that were not true, the bulk affect could easily still be positive simply from removing all the bad affects even reasonable patent proponents admit is implied in such a system, for reasons I've mentioned at least in part.
Copyrights, in essence, are more defensible, but again it must be emphasised that they are not property, that they are in fact monopoly grants which violate property by prohibiting peaceful and honest use of ones property in certain ways, and that there is a world of difference between the original Constitutional copyright system and the current 'IP' system. Authors, under the current system, are not getting rich from their writings. Authors in fact very rarely keep their copyrights, they usually have to give them up in order to get published. People write for many reasons, getting rich is rarely one of them and when it is it almost always leads only to disappointment. Without copyright people would still write, there would still be a market for books, and authors could still make some money, very likely as much or more than they make now in many cases, without them. Is it worth money to a publishing house to have a novel written that they can hold exclusive using simple secrecy long enough to make a full run of a book and have it on storeshelves around the world before the competitor can begin typesetting it? Of course it is. So, without copyrights, there would still be money in writing, and even if there were no money in writing, there would still be writers. We write for any number of reasons, and very few make any serious amount of money anyway. So I really think the chicken little arguments are nonsense. Creativity wouldn't be abolished because copyright a
Umm... they don't move at anything close to the speed of light in vacuum.
First things first - let me point out that by that definition light doesn't travel at the speed of light either - the light inside an optical processor isn't going to be moving in a vaccuum either. In context, we're obviously not talking about the speed of light in a vacuum, but the speed of light in a medium, which is a little slower but still very very fast.
Now on to the Clintonesque bit - it all depends on what you mean by electricity. No, the electrons themselves, the particles, don't move at anything like the speed of light. Drift velocity is actually shockingly slow. But the field itself, which is generally what people think of as electricity, does indeed move at approximately the speed of light, just like inside an optical processor. If you turn on your lightswitch, the 'electricity' hits the bulb at approximately the speed of light. If you make a telephone call, the lag between when you say something and when the other person hears it is approximately the speed of light by the length of wire involved. If you send a packet, it' the same, except with lots of delays at routers. And it's the same inside a silicon chip.
Don't get me wrong, there are obviously advantages to optical processor technology. But this isn't one of them.
'Intellectual property' has been around probably less than 40 years. Your examples are correct, but they don't contradict that.
Yes, people have been keeping secrets... probably as long as there have been people. That, in and of itself, is not 'intellectual property.' It's just keeping secrets. The kernel of the idea of 'intellectual property' is quite distinct from the notion of trade secrets, or even copyright in the sense it had until recently. Trade secrets are trade secrets - and legal protection of them is little more than straight contract law. Copyrights and patents are something quite different, they're state-backed monopoly grants to ideas and implementations of those ideas. Only when these three things start being conflated with property rights do we start seeing anything like the 'IP' that corporate lawyers and their shills rattle on about today.
So ludicrous that I suppose they won't bother patenting their designs next time? Like hell. If they weren't protecting something of value they wouldn't bother
Here's something you don't seem to grasp. Of course they're going to patent it. We live in a system where they can get something of value that way, sure - legal tools to use against competitors, legal tools even to use as a defense against similar legal tools in the competitors hands. Offensive patents, defensive patents - sure they're of value, because they are backed by the full force of the legal system and, if need be, law enforcement. So what?
If you could buy a 'get out of jail free card' in real life, that would damn sure be 'something of value' also, and you'd see a lot of people buying them. This would not mean that these are therefore valuable things in the broader sense, or that it would be overall a good or right thing to have such a system.
I said this thing is absurd, and a good example to show people what nonsense 'IP' is. I also said that there should be no need to show prior art to try stop this. I didn't say any of the things you seem to have read into it.
As a matter of fact, now that you 'asked', I'm extremely skeptical of the notion that anything should be 'patentable subject matter', and even moreso of the notion that software in particular should be such.
You're right -- that notion is absurd -- but if you'd actually bother to read the
patent, you'd notice that your gross oversimplification isn't anywhere close to what Eolas actually claims.
I've read it. I stand by my characterisation. I encourage anyone that's wondering to read it themselves, and preserved the link in the quoted text above to encourage just that. It covers what I said, along with a few extremely general and obvious ideas such as letting the client and the server talk to each other as the content is displayed. If you think there is something more there please feel free to quote the part in question.
While I agree that this patent is bullshit, it's also clear that someone (probably Netscape) copied this guy's idea down to the last detail. I'm not sure if this was done maliciously and/or because the guy also showed his idea to the W3C.
I don't think that's clear at all. It could be that they copied him, it could be that he copied them, it could be that EMBED is a pretty obvious keyword for this sort of thing, and using a tag in that way in the context of HTML to indicate plugin content is a pretty obvious idea that a lot of people were having at that time.
Gee, coinciding with the *Industrial Revolution* I bet. So you wouldn't be living in a cave without IP, you'd be living in a straw-roofed shack without electricity, plumbing, and certainly without the internet.
You're assuming that technological progress would have stopped at that point, all over the world, just because the handful of countries that introduced relatively mild copyright and patent laws at this time did otherwise? That's a huge an unwarranted assumption, and/or a a circular argument.
If anything, the bulk affect of these laws is to stifle progress, not to help it. Particularly with the current 'modern' implementations of these ideas.
So without patents, we'd all have polio, we'd all still be using antibiotics for which bacteria are immune, we wouldn't have any painkillers, no TV, no internet, no computers...do I need to keep going?
No, you need to back up and figure out where you got lost. The notion that human inventiveness would suddenly cease if people couldn't lay legal claim to ideas is absolutely absurd.
Not all intellectual property is the Eolas flavor, and only someone who is entirely ignorant on the subject would contend as much.
And I didn't say anything of the sort. I said it's a wonderful example. Do you know what an example is? It's a single datapoint that can be used to illustrate a broader point. It's not a syllogism or any other sort of proof, it's an example.
Without "intellectual property," friend, you'd be reading this article on a soot-darkened cave wall.
Nonsense. 'Intellectual property' is a very, very recent invention. It was a radical new idea in the 1700s, ignored by most nations, including many of the more prosperous ones, and where it did exist it had a much milder form than today. What we call 'IP' today really hasn't existed until just a few years ago. I suppose we were all cave dwellers before that? Bull.
Can't they patent the new device? Doesn't Sears do this all the time with some new variation of an old tool (screwdriver)?
Yes, they can. That's stupid too. It's not quite as bad, however, because the patents in those cases are very narrow, covering only a very specific implementation of the idea - someone else can come along and do the same thing in a slightly different way and be legally alright. The equivalent in a software patent might be to allow patenting a particular section of code, but that would be superfluous since copyright has that affect already. Actually, come to think of it, that would be an improvement over current copyright laws, because it would require publication of the code at least. On the other hand, it would still be worse in a different way, because you can infringe a patent through independent invention, but copyright doesn't work that way.
"Processing at the speed of light, you can have safer airports"
Its really quite sick and disturbing that the aftermath of 9/11 has degraded to a marketing ploy
It's also disturbing that they (and you) don't seem to realise that the electrical impulses in silicon chips also move at the speed of light.
Then again, most everything marketing types write makes me want to spew. I presume if they ever say anything that's not deceptive they get banned from the industry for life or something.
There should be no need for prior art. The very idea that you can patent the idea of putting something that used to appear in a new window embedded in the original window instead is just absurd beyond belief. A wonderful example of what nonsense the entire idea of 'intellectual property' is.
Hmm... this would seem to be a good thing for Open Source... except, how Open Source is Sun's Java Enterprise System? Admittedly, this is the first I've really looked into it.
It's a lot more Open Source than it is Java.
Except for shipping with Suns Java installed (not unusual,) it doesn't seem to have anything to do with Java at all. Branding. Spew.
I'm not involved with it so this isn't firsthand, but from what I've read it's pretty much a standard Linux desktop distro, with a Sun theme, and a few patches from Sun that haven't been accepted into the main trees yet.
Regarding the Insurance software, you wrote:
Does anybody realistically see that changing anytime soon?
Sure. I can't say exactly when, but sooner or later a company will realise that they can hire a few programmers to do what they want and dramatically cut their costs. Hopefully they'll base it on some Free Software that's already close to what they need, so it will be Free too, if not it may be binary only but they should try to recoup some of the upfront costs by selling it to others. Just a matter of who does it first, and how smart they are about doing it.
What specifically are you looking for software to do? My experience with Insurance software is quite out of date, but I remember a contact manager, datebook, a general accounting package with a very small amount of customisation, and a program to dial into the national headquarters and sync data. Oh, and a few scripts to tie it all together. Is that the sort of stuff you're thinking of? If it's anything like what I've seen it wouldn't take very many man-hours really.
So, if GPL was decreed unenforceable, what would it actually mean?
It should mean basically what the other poster who replied here said, excepting the use/copying distinction that was already mentioned in another reply.
But, if we assume enough craziness to get to the GPL somehow being invalidated to begin with, it's really beyond prediction. I find it impossible to think of any half-sane legal theory under which you'd get such a result, so really, if it happened, we just don't know what it would mean. It could even be something like what SCO seems to think they can get now. Exactly why I think it would be a good thing to use this opportunity to get a precedent now, because while we can imagine a future where someone like SCO bribes the judges and no one like IBM is around to fight them, that future is not now - right now we should be able to get a sane ruling, and thus a sane precedent.
I think their argument (although, honestly, it's so damn hard to figure out what their argument is with it constantly changing I'm probably giving them much more benefit of the doubt than is called for) is actually a little more defensible. If you read the original contract, which they quote a lot, it would seem that by that contract anything IBM added into AIX would, not be owned by SCO necessarily, but nevertheless be under the same confidentiality obligations as the stuff that was. Which would mean that IBM would be in breach as they say. Now if you read them as taking that tack, they're essentially saying that all their earlier statements about copyright were bullshit, there's no copyright issue, just a breach of contract. And, like I said, IBM has amendments that will protect them from that charge too - but, at least according to the latest version of TSG's story, it's not about copyright and they're not claiming copyright on the stuff in question.
The way they keep dancing and changing their story, however, should by itself be enough to turn the Judge against them. Judges don't like to be treated like fools generally, and that's exactly what TSG is doing - acting like they think the Judge is mentally retarded or senile or something and can't remember what they said in their last filing when reading their current one.
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I went from using Linux on my main box to using an Apple as my main too, but the resemblence ends there.
I use the Apple because I have to have a few proprietary programs that don't have Linux versions. It was Apple or XP, and Apple wins that comparison hands down.
But I strongly disagree that it beats Linux, for my purposes, outside of that constraint.
I must disagree.
OSX (I'm typing this in it now) is better in a lot of ways, don't get me wrong. It's great to have a real command line - but the typical Mac user will never use it. It's great to have multitasking, and a real stable OS, that's for sure. The technical underpinnings of OSX are far superior to Classic.
But, if you look at the traditional Mac audience, the folks that have been their loyal customers all these years, the thing that's most important to them is a really well designed and stable GUI. Stable in the sense of not changing needlessly and causing confusion between revisions, not in the sense of not crashing. Classic does crash enough to be a mild PITA, but it was the most stable thing around so far as the GUI is concerned.
And this is the one area where OSX is a step backwards. Apple has fallen for what we could call the Microsoft syndrome, fallen in love with flashy graphics at the expense of a clean UI, and it shows. It's not as bad as XP, no, and that's fortunate for Apple, because otherwise they'd be losing a lot of those old loyal customers. As it is, instead of jumping platform, they're resisting upgrading. Because the GUI just isn't as good. Everything else is a lot better, but we're talking about people for whom the GUI is critical.
I really hope Apple comes to their sense and, if they won't roll back the GUI (I don't have a shadow of a hope that they will) by default at least have an option for the user to do so.
Very likely the case. I remember for a little while I was the only person that did that, then our secretary asked me about that wierd window at the bottom of my screen, and I explained it and showed how I kept it open so I knew exactly what I was selecting, where I put attributes and the like... a couple weeks later I noticed that everyone in the office had switched it on.
I used WP from version 4 through 6, and that's not how I remember it. You just selected the text and then selected bold if memory serves, like most word processors. Of course the tag soup you're talking about was hiding back there, and even in this situation where you don't have to worry about another program trying to parse the thing this is bad - it can cause all sorts of strange little problems, like for instance if you delete the text but not the spaces around it, and the spaces were inside the bold tags, then later you put your cursor in those spaces and start typing - wtf is that bold?!?!? The beautiful thing with WP though, unlike Word, was you could 'reveal codes' and figure these things out.
I preferred at the time to do my text in a real editor, then mark it up when it was ready and print it out with Ventura - but some things we did had to be electronically submitted in WP or Word, and WP was always a hell of a lot better than Word.
Anyway, although I disagree that "valid and semantically correct HTML wasn't even considered by anyone" - there are far too many self-described web designers that fit that bill, and were even in the early days, although it's my impression that's gotten worse, not better. Other than that, I agree with pretty much all you said. I think you're exactly right on the mechanics that cause the tag soup, and the mechanics of how a decent WYSIWYG editor could go about cleaning it up.
If by "they" you mean Jews, you're wrong. It was Europe where they were at odds for thousands of years, the Muslim world was a relative safe haven for Jews until very recently.
If by "they" you mean the Israeli government, it's existed for decades, not thousands of years.
And, of course, the fact that "they" are unpopular with the Arab world at the moment couldn't have anything to do with the occupation, land grabbing, apartheid system, and open aspirations of ethnic cleansing of the Israeli government, which pretends to speak for Jews as a whole even though many disagree wholeheartedly with its policies. That would be far too obvious.
But if this thing is a real Frontpage work-alike, it's going to spit out horrid broken code almost as bad as Word anyway, that's the biggest worry I would have.
I do simply html in notepad/textedit whatever, and use Emacs with html and php syntax highlighting when I need more, so the holy war aside we basically agree on that, and although I think Emacs is infinitely more newbie friendly than VI, it's still obviously not something I could expect my mom to sit down and start coding pages in. So yes, something like this could be good. But every implementation of this idea I've seen yet spits out horrible broken code and there are reasons for that, so I'm a bit skeptical too.
You obviously hold yourself to be the expert in that area, and I'm not going to dispute that. I question whether I should even bother going further, because I doubt you'll pay any mind to ideas that contradict your own in your field of expertise, but on the off chance that you do, I'll point out that science and engineering made great progress before the patent system ever existed, and continued to make progress in many countries that didn't have patents long after that point. I think your argument is deeply rooted in fact, but also in missing the point in a way. Obviously, without all the features of the current situation, the current business model would not work as it does. This doesn't mean no business model would be possible, let alone that progress would suddenly come to a halt.
First, as to the patents, that's really a very long complicated argument you want to get into that I quite simply don't have time to cover fully today, or any day soon. I'll try, but it will inevitably be merely a teaser, because I just don't have time to write a full thesis on the subject now. This is not my page and I may disagree on some details, but it's a start. If you read other posts in this thread there is one that discusses the importance of not enforcing patents to the progress of the industrial revolution in the US and Germany, and if you do a little research you will find that Holland and Switzerland in their economic heyday are similar stories.
At any rate, let's keep in mind that 'IP' is more than just patents, copyrights, and trade secrets - it's the combination of those conflated with property.
This last is a very recent phenomenon, and has lead to the excessive measures even reasonable proponents of patent and copyrights decry. That's the most important point I suppose - that these things are not property, they are privelege in the original sense.
Now beyond that, I have no problem with trade secrets at all, and I think that most everything good that could come from patents could be achieved in that way, without the violation of real property implied in a patent regime of any kind. Given that patents prohibit independent invention and prevent people from peacefully and honestly using their own property in any implementation I find them very hard to defend. And I think the notion that people would quit inventing without them is ludicrous. People invent for a great number of reasons, getting rich off patents is only one of them. Without a patent regime, an inventor who invents only for money (likely, in my opinion, to be not the most important subset, but be that as it may) will still have a profit motive, the difference will be simply in the details of how to get from A to B - rather than rushing to file a patent before anyone else, he would instead work to produce and sell actual product before anyone else, to take and maintain an early lead in the field through trade secrets and continual research and refinement. I think it is plausible that this would result in more, not less, invention. And even if that were not true, the bulk affect could easily still be positive simply from removing all the bad affects even reasonable patent proponents admit is implied in such a system, for reasons I've mentioned at least in part.
Copyrights, in essence, are more defensible, but again it must be emphasised that they are not property, that they are in fact monopoly grants which violate property by prohibiting peaceful and honest use of ones property in certain ways, and that there is a world of difference between the original Constitutional copyright system and the current 'IP' system. Authors, under the current system, are not getting rich from their writings. Authors in fact very rarely keep their copyrights, they usually have to give them up in order to get published. People write for many reasons, getting rich is rarely one of them and when it is it almost always leads only to disappointment. Without copyright people would still write, there would still be a market for books, and authors could still make some money, very likely as much or more than they make now in many cases, without them. Is it worth money to a publishing house to have a novel written that they can hold exclusive using simple secrecy long enough to make a full run of a book and have it on storeshelves around the world before the competitor can begin typesetting it? Of course it is. So, without copyrights, there would still be money in writing, and even if there were no money in writing, there would still be writers. We write for any number of reasons, and very few make any serious amount of money anyway. So I really think the chicken little arguments are nonsense. Creativity wouldn't be abolished because copyright a
First things first - let me point out that by that definition light doesn't travel at the speed of light either - the light inside an optical processor isn't going to be moving in a vaccuum either. In context, we're obviously not talking about the speed of light in a vacuum, but the speed of light in a medium, which is a little slower but still very very fast.
Now on to the Clintonesque bit - it all depends on what you mean by electricity. No, the electrons themselves, the particles, don't move at anything like the speed of light. Drift velocity is actually shockingly slow. But the field itself, which is generally what people think of as electricity, does indeed move at approximately the speed of light, just like inside an optical processor. If you turn on your lightswitch, the 'electricity' hits the bulb at approximately the speed of light. If you make a telephone call, the lag between when you say something and when the other person hears it is approximately the speed of light by the length of wire involved. If you send a packet, it' the same, except with lots of delays at routers. And it's the same inside a silicon chip.
Don't get me wrong, there are obviously advantages to optical processor technology. But this isn't one of them.
'Intellectual property' has been around probably less than 40 years. Your examples are correct, but they don't contradict that.
Yes, people have been keeping secrets... probably as long as there have been people. That, in and of itself, is not 'intellectual property.' It's just keeping secrets. The kernel of the idea of 'intellectual property' is quite distinct from the notion of trade secrets, or even copyright in the sense it had until recently. Trade secrets are trade secrets - and legal protection of them is little more than straight contract law. Copyrights and patents are something quite different, they're state-backed monopoly grants to ideas and implementations of those ideas. Only when these three things start being conflated with property rights do we start seeing anything like the 'IP' that corporate lawyers and their shills rattle on about today.
Here's something you don't seem to grasp. Of course they're going to patent it. We live in a system where they can get something of value that way, sure - legal tools to use against competitors, legal tools even to use as a defense against similar legal tools in the competitors hands. Offensive patents, defensive patents - sure they're of value, because they are backed by the full force of the legal system and, if need be, law enforcement. So what?
If you could buy a 'get out of jail free card' in real life, that would damn sure be 'something of value' also, and you'd see a lot of people buying them. This would not mean that these are therefore valuable things in the broader sense, or that it would be overall a good or right thing to have such a system.
It's funny you read so much into what I said.
I said this thing is absurd, and a good example to show people what nonsense 'IP' is. I also said that there should be no need to show prior art to try stop this. I didn't say any of the things you seem to have read into it.
As a matter of fact, now that you 'asked', I'm extremely skeptical of the notion that anything should be 'patentable subject matter', and even moreso of the notion that software in particular should be such.
I've read it. I stand by my characterisation. I encourage anyone that's wondering to read it themselves, and preserved the link in the quoted text above to encourage just that. It covers what I said, along with a few extremely general and obvious ideas such as letting the client and the server talk to each other as the content is displayed. If you think there is something more there please feel free to quote the part in question.
I don't think that's clear at all. It could be that they copied him, it could be that he copied them, it could be that EMBED is a pretty obvious keyword for this sort of thing, and using a tag in that way in the context of HTML to indicate plugin content is a pretty obvious idea that a lot of people were having at that time.
You're assuming that technological progress would have stopped at that point, all over the world, just because the handful of countries that introduced relatively mild copyright and patent laws at this time did otherwise? That's a huge an unwarranted assumption, and/or a a circular argument.
If anything, the bulk affect of these laws is to stifle progress, not to help it. Particularly with the current 'modern' implementations of these ideas.
No, you need to back up and figure out where you got lost. The notion that human inventiveness would suddenly cease if people couldn't lay legal claim to ideas is absolutely absurd.
Correct. Thanks.
And I didn't say anything of the sort. I said it's a wonderful example. Do you know what an example is? It's a single datapoint that can be used to illustrate a broader point. It's not a syllogism or any other sort of proof, it's an example.
Nonsense. 'Intellectual property' is a very, very recent invention. It was a radical new idea in the 1700s, ignored by most nations, including many of the more prosperous ones, and where it did exist it had a much milder form than today. What we call 'IP' today really hasn't existed until just a few years ago. I suppose we were all cave dwellers before that? Bull.
Yes, they can. That's stupid too. It's not quite as bad, however, because the patents in those cases are very narrow, covering only a very specific implementation of the idea - someone else can come along and do the same thing in a slightly different way and be legally alright. The equivalent in a software patent might be to allow patenting a particular section of code, but that would be superfluous since copyright has that affect already. Actually, come to think of it, that would be an improvement over current copyright laws, because it would require publication of the code at least. On the other hand, it would still be worse in a different way, because you can infringe a patent through independent invention, but copyright doesn't work that way.
It's also disturbing that they (and you) don't seem to realise that the electrical impulses in silicon chips also move at the speed of light.
Then again, most everything marketing types write makes me want to spew. I presume if they ever say anything that's not deceptive they get banned from the industry for life or something.
There should be no need for prior art. The very idea that you can patent the idea of putting something that used to appear in a new window embedded in the original window instead is just absurd beyond belief. A wonderful example of what nonsense the entire idea of 'intellectual property' is.
It's a lot more Open Source than it is Java.
Except for shipping with Suns Java installed (not unusual,) it doesn't seem to have anything to do with Java at all. Branding. Spew.
I'm not involved with it so this isn't firsthand, but from what I've read it's pretty much a standard Linux desktop distro, with a Sun theme, and a few patches from Sun that haven't been accepted into the main trees yet.
Regarding the Insurance software, you wrote:
Sure. I can't say exactly when, but sooner or later a company will realise that they can hire a few programmers to do what they want and dramatically cut their costs. Hopefully they'll base it on some Free Software that's already close to what they need, so it will be Free too, if not it may be binary only but they should try to recoup some of the upfront costs by selling it to others. Just a matter of who does it first, and how smart they are about doing it.
What specifically are you looking for software to do? My experience with Insurance software is quite out of date, but I remember a contact manager, datebook, a general accounting package with a very small amount of customisation, and a program to dial into the national headquarters and sync data. Oh, and a few scripts to tie it all together. Is that the sort of stuff you're thinking of? If it's anything like what I've seen it wouldn't take very many man-hours really.
Get your 2.4 kernel source here.
It should mean basically what the other poster who replied here said, excepting the use/copying distinction that was already mentioned in another reply.
But, if we assume enough craziness to get to the GPL somehow being invalidated to begin with, it's really beyond prediction. I find it impossible to think of any half-sane legal theory under which you'd get such a result, so really, if it happened, we just don't know what it would mean. It could even be something like what SCO seems to think they can get now. Exactly why I think it would be a good thing to use this opportunity to get a precedent now, because while we can imagine a future where someone like SCO bribes the judges and no one like IBM is around to fight them, that future is not now - right now we should be able to get a sane ruling, and thus a sane precedent.
I think their argument (although, honestly, it's so damn hard to figure out what their argument is with it constantly changing I'm probably giving them much more benefit of the doubt than is called for) is actually a little more defensible. If you read the original contract, which they quote a lot, it would seem that by that contract anything IBM added into AIX would, not be owned by SCO necessarily, but nevertheless be under the same confidentiality obligations as the stuff that was. Which would mean that IBM would be in breach as they say. Now if you read them as taking that tack, they're essentially saying that all their earlier statements about copyright were bullshit, there's no copyright issue, just a breach of contract. And, like I said, IBM has amendments that will protect them from that charge too - but, at least according to the latest version of TSG's story, it's not about copyright and they're not claiming copyright on the stuff in question.
The way they keep dancing and changing their story, however, should by itself be enough to turn the Judge against them. Judges don't like to be treated like fools generally, and that's exactly what TSG is doing - acting like they think the Judge is mentally retarded or senile or something and can't remember what they said in their last filing when reading their current one.