US patent laws derive directly from Clause 8 of the US Constitution, where
it says that Congress is empowered..
"..To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to
Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"
Note the words "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts..."
I would say that any necesary condition on a patent would be that it indeed "promotes the progress
of Science and the useful Arts". In other words, the purpose of even sanctioning patents is
so that people would have incentives to go out and invent things. The assumption is,
that absent a patent, folks will sit on their bums and not invent anything.
With a patent, the inventor can profit, but so does society. If there is no benefit to society,
why allow the patent?
Until relatively recently (the 1980's?), software patents were virtually nonexistant. Did that
stop "inventions" in the world of software? That's laughable, since that was the time of
immense creativity, new companies, products, inventions. To me that is PROOF that patents
in software are hardly needed to "promote the progress of Science and the useful Arts". Think
of all the software companies that came of age in the 1980's and 90's. WITHOUT patent
protection (for the most part). WHY allow software patents? For what purpose?
The only reason I can see is to benefit the legal profession. And large companies.
In addition, software patents have a number of flaws, mostly due to practicalities
deriving from the ease with which software designers can conjure up new techniques,
visual elements, user-interface designs, wire protocols, languages,database designs, and
the like. Software is a "soft" science - it doesn't require expensive
laboratories or extensive field trials.
It is playing in a virtual world. You can sit in your room and without spending millions
of dollars, come up with amazing things. But so can the person across the street or around
the globe! And they do! So MUCH of what is "patented" are just "obvious" takes or re-takes
of what already abounds, or would abound, should someone else in a room have to solve
that same problem. Many patents are not novel, complicated, unusual. Clever, maybe.
But someone else in the same circumstance might come up with the same exact thing.
Why should the first person be granted 20 years of "protection"?
IF we were to allow software patents at all, say, for truly novel, complex things (yet
to be determined how you would define this), we should limit the term - to say, 3 years.
So yeah, go patent your "One Click" or your "Bouncy Screen" - if approved (dubious for these),
you would have only 3 years to profit from your exclusive deal. Far fewer patents would be
applied for. Far less litigation.
And software designers and companies could create great things and compete on what they
are offering, and not who they are suing. And, believe me, tech would flourish. Software patents
are a TAX on everyone.
What does abolishing software patents have to do with "copyright"? Two completely different animals.
I am for abolishing software patents - for all the reasons everyone sites. But "stealing" someone's actual code or implementation or book or music is another story.
I love Linux, and as a developer, use it as my main os (ubuntu). It is so easy to develop on, and it's package management is superb. I don't use the desktop per se, that much, and am usually command-line driven.
I have a Mac, and use it for some things, at times. It's nice, for sure, but I love the openness of Linux, even though, of course, there can be many very painful hardware issues (video, sound, etc), all of which I have experienced at one time or another.
I am wondering - I hear Google is working on a "Android desktop". Would that perhaps maybe change things regarding the "Linux desktop" a bit?
The only accurate statement in this article is that the government resisted commercial use of the the internet for a long time.
The rest it total garbage, written by someone who denies facts to promote an agenda. This is what is really sad. I mean, come on, the government (primarily DOD) of course spearheaded ARPANET, NSFNET, etc. which morphed into the internet we know of today. It's indisputable - funding poured into universities, and into private contractors (like BB&N) to work on this. Even Silicon Valley itself, it can be argued, wouldn't be here if it weren't for the government in the early days.
This is not to say that the government is wonderful, or that it is good, or should be larger in our lives, or anything like that - but, a FACT is a FACT. These birthers and creationists and other deniers just make up things to fit their models. To me, that is incredibly dangerous.
And note that the guy who wrote this article has "impressive" credentials - Yale, law school, Rhodes Scholar. But he doesn't have a clue about how modern technology works! (equating Xerox's Ethernet with the "internet", for example). This is pathetic, and pathetic that the "venerated" Wall Street Journal would publish this nonsense.
There is a lot to be recommended in Django. However, there are some infuriating limitations. I would love a version of Django which was based on SQLAlchemy, and which supports all the fun things Django users love like admin and South. We'd have the best of both worlds.