🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <PREECE.91Nov6094424@neptune.urbana.mcd.mot.com>,
preece@urbana.mcd.mot.com (Scott E. Preece) writes:

> But apparently a lot of the GNU people have this sort of self-conscious
> idea that they will look stupid if someone else makes money off their
> work.  I don't know whether this is lack of self-confidence (believing
> others can turn their work into something much, much better than they
> could hope to compete with) or just lack of the courage of their
> convictions, but it does wear thin after a while.

That's not even an interesting reason for opposing look-and-feel copyright
and patents on mathematical algorithms.  One poster who said something
like this does not make "a lot" of GNU people.

The United States can have look-and-feel copyright and algorithm patents
or it can have computer science and scientific computing, but it can't
have both, not for long.

If the current legal mess continues, innovation in computing will be
destroyed.  The ability to get new and interesting things done with
computers will be strangled, to that some vendors can have a lock on
the bozo segment of the market.

Software from vendors is typically useless for doing anything out of the
ordinary, anything *new*.  When it becomes impossible to write nontrivial
software without being subject to lawsuits, that's the end of innovative
computing in the U. S. of A.

That's the issue.

-- 
Charles Geyer
School of Statistics
University of Minnesota
charlie@umnstat.stat.umn.edu