Free?

[Chante]

"Steven Schveighoffer" <schveiguy at yahoo.com> wrote in message 
news:op.v3zaemhyeav7ka at localhost.localdomain...
> On Wed, 26 Oct 2011 15:28:21 -0400, Kagamin <spam at here.lot> wrote:
>
>> Steven Schveighoffer Wrote:
>>
>>> patents exist to give an *incentive* to give away trade secrets that 
>>> would
>>> otherwise die with the inventor.  The idea is, if you patent 
>>> something,
>>> you enjoy a period of monopoly, where you can profit from the fruits 
>>> of
>>> your invention.
>>
>> I think, this can work for software the same way.
>
> You can profit from the fruits of your invention *without* patents. 
> You  can with machines as well, but software has the added bonus that 
> copyright  protects your IP.
>
> But it's much harder to reverse engineer how someone built a machine 
> than  it is to reverse engineer how software is built.  The secrets can 
> truly  die with the inventor, as opposed to software -- regardless of 
> the final  binary format, it's always possible to get back to source 
> code.  And  thanks to copyright law, that source code is a derivative 
> work, you can't  use it unless you license it from the originator.
>
>>> Add that to the fact that software
>>> patents are *rarely* beneficial to the community.
>>
>> Does the community want benefits at the expense of the inventor?
>
> The *point* of patents is to benefit the community.  The price society 
> pays to the inventor is granting a monopoly.  I'd argue that a 17-year 
> monopoly on software technology and algorithms

Oh, I didn't know it was that long. Yes, I wouldn't complain about that. 
2 years would definitely be too short though. Perhaps the amount of 
man-years invested in the R&D for the technology. Oh wait, that would be 
100's of years in lots of cases!

> is too high a price to pay  for knowing a "secret" you can't use until 
> it's very obsolete.  17 years  ago was 1994, Windows 3.1 was all the 
> rage.  Do you really think society  is now going to benefit from using 
> the patented technologies from then?

One can easily argue that if another can only deliver software by copying 
someone else's techniques, then maybe they should be in another line of 
business and that keeping technology out of the hands of the copycats is 
a good thing.

There's something very wrong about this patent situation, as it seems 
"one can't win for losing" with it. I wish everyone would just keep their 
trade secrets a secret! It would be much simpler then. Then all the 
scrambling around could be eliminated and those doing all the scrambling 
could be put to better use being productive.