🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <KAP1.91Oct31230602@icarus.spc.uchicago.edu> kap1@icarus.spc.uchicago.edu (Dietrich Kappe) writes:
>In article <1991Oct31.195608.226@skitzo.dseg.ti.com> dittman@skitzo.dseg.ti.com (Eric Dittman) writes:
>
>   From Byte, April 1991, "Computing in the U.S.S.R.", by Igor Agamirzian,
>   writing on the decline of Soviet informatics and computer science:
>
>   "In developed countries, copyright laws protect the humanitarian as well
>    as scientific and technological spheres.  In the U.S.S.R., the product
>    of intellectual work does not belong to its author; it does not even
>    belong to the organization within which it is developed.
>      Unfortunately, this is one of the main reasons for our decline in
>    these disciplines.  Why should we invest in products if we can obtain
>    everything free?"
>
>   So, why will getting rid of copyrights and patents in the U.S. improve
>   the state of the art instead of leading to the decay of the software
>   industry like in the Soviet Union?
>
>   Will a company devote thousands or millions of dollars to develop new
>   programs if programmers are just going to clone the program as soon as
>   they are released?
>
>Without voicing an opinion on the correctness of your
>view, the example you are basing your argument on is very much out of
>context. I would say that the decline of all productivity, whether 
>intellectual or physical, is a malaise common to authoritarian 
>communist states. Even if you make money with a software product,
>what can you spend it on?
>
>In that hotbed of capitalism, Hong Kong, where software is cloned
>as fast as its released, would you say that no one invests in software?
>
>As I see it, there are two ways to arrive at a good peice of software:
>
>1) Friendlysoft (or some garage hacker) spends millions of dollars (or 
>hundreds of hours) on a full featured program. It springs into the market
>full blown (with a few bugs) and is infrequently updated.
>
>2) Cheapsoft comes out with a shody piece of software. Cheapersoft
>makes a miniscule improvement on that software and sells it for
>$5 less. This keeps on going until we have 100's of really good
>packages out there competing with one another.
>
>There are of course pros and cons to both scenarios. Without getting into
>these, I would simply venture that competition and deregulation are
>good for the software market, and that patents and broad copyrights
>are bad for the industry.
>
>One final question: what do you get for investing millions of dollars
>in a single program? What sort of breakthru's are you acheiving? Up until now,
>software development was an area where a multi-million dollar company
>had only a probabalistic advantage over an individual in software
>development (faster and more likely to come out with lots of good
>software). Count in marketing and distribution and of course the big
>company has the advantage. But with legal fees, the big company
>must win against the individual.
>
>
>--
>
>---
>Dietrich Kappe
>kap1@icarus.spc.uchicago.edu
>Center for Population Economics