🚀 go-pugleaf

de5@STC06.CTD.ORNL.GOV (SILL D E) writes:

>Let's not forget what patents are and who they're designed to benefit. 
>They're intended to encourage the publishing of innovative,
>non-obvious designs by providing a temporary right to exclusive use of
>those designs to the inventor.  Such innovations might otherwise
>remain trade secrets and *never* become public domain.

Right on the button! The idea is that somebody patents a process in order
to advance an area of innovation while reserving some way of making money for
themselves. Patents applied to software are a bastardization of this idea -
instead of helping software engineering, patents are crippling it. The problem
is that some large, fat companies cannot compete in a free market where there is
plenty of innovation from many bright individuals.

The idea of a patent is that, for society, it is better than a company secret,
because it quickly brings innovative ideas to light. However, in the
software industry, patents are *more* REgressive than company secrets. For
example, if all compression algorithms that are patented were instead kept
secret, we would have a situation where all published compression algorithms
were freely available. This would mean that researchers would be free to
draw upon all published material without fear of litigation.

In a rapidly developing field like software engineering patents are MORE
secure than company secrets. This is because the period during which a patent
is protected is far longer than it would take for the idea to be independently
rediscovered. The theory is that patents should encourage innovators to bring
forth their ideas and thus speed up development. In the software industry,
this idea is still-born, since people will come up with ideas anyway - they
will make their ideas known freely and willingly. Look at what a great job
GNU is doing.

If companies think that they are doing people favors by patenting software
algorithms, they should be told to forget it - keep them secret instead.
If companies would rather have a mechanism for ensuring algorithm
monopolies instead, they should try to lobby for a mechanism to specifically
do that - then their position as anti-free marketeers would be plain.

	Steve Austin

These are my own opinions and not necessarily those of anybody I work for or
am associated with.