🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1991Nov7.152026.13220@cs.umn.edu> charlie@umnstat.stat.umn.edu (Charles Geyer) writes:

| 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.
---
I don't know what Charles *thought* he was responding to, but there's
nothing at all in my note about look-and-feel copyright or patents.  I
was talking about Copyleft and whether the possibility of someone else
profiting from your work was a reasonable argument against releasing
your work as public domain.  And, yes, I've seen enough debate in this
newsgroup to say with no fear at all that the attitude I questioned has
been expressed by a lot more than one poster (though, to be fair, saying
"GNU people" was not what I meant -- I meant Copyleft supporters).
---
|
| 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.
---
As I said, I wasn't talking about these issues.  But since you bring
them up ...

I think the application of patent law to software needs significant
tuning -- some patents have been issued which clearly were not
non-obvious or without prior art -- but much of the discussion claiming
that software is significantly different from other areas of invention
is not very convincing.  We may have to learn to pay more attention to
what technology is patented, but, frankly, most of us would be better
engineers if we paid more attention to what other people had developed
and spent less time trying to invent everything ourselves.

scott
--
scott preece
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