🚀 go-pugleaf

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.


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Dietrich Kappe
kap1@icarus.spc.uchicago.edu
Center for Population Economics