From: peter@ferranti.com (peter da silva)
Subject: Re: Patents:  What they are.  What they aren't.  Other factors.
Organization: Xenix Support, FICC
Distribution: usa
Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1992 16:40:38 GMT

In article <5a+pn5l.mcgregor@netcom.com> mcgregor@netcom.com (Scott Mcgregor) writes:
> In article <id.W3NT.1JL@ferranti.com> peter@ferranti.com (peter da silva) writes:
> >The question is, how do you identify which lines of code contain inventions:
> >software systems are orders of magnitude more complex than any other class of
> >inventions. 

> This is simply not true. Complex factories and refineries have
> thousands, even hundreds of thousands of components in them.

Complex factories and refineries are built by large multinational corporations
with large legal staffs. Software of equivalent complexity is built by hackers
in their spare bedrooms. Larger organizations are currently building software
systems with millions and hundreds of millions of lines of code.

In addition, most of those hundreds of thousands of components are identical.
In software, you rarely find two identical components. If you did, you'd make
them a subroutine.

> >A *simple* program is thousands of lines long, and each line has
> >the potential of violating a patent. How do you determine if it does or not?
> >Perform a thousand patent searches? 

> No, it is much easier than that, do one search of a patent database
> looking for one thousand things.

Well, that's basically what I was getting at. And this is for a program
like "Xeyes" or "postnews". Substantial programs (the ones that are likely
to attract attention) are many times larger.

> Or you could adopt risk reduction strategies of other
> industries: Use algorithms that are published (Knuth, et al) that
> makes them part of the prior art.

OK, do this as an excersize. Take a small program... xterm, for example,
and generate a list of the potentially patentable algorithms in it. Even
after the fact with that as your primary goal it's going to be tough, when
there are patents that you can violate simply by doing an indirection in
the wrong place.

Right now, software development is incredibly cheap. Programs with the
complexity of an automobile are being written and given away. It's not
reasonable to simply make software development *as hard as* development
in other areas... and I think that what's happening has the potential
for making it MUCH harder.

> Every other
> industry that has faced the licensing of hundreds or thousands of
> pieces of intellectual property has found low cost solutions other
> than overturning the intellectual property law itself.  How come we in
> software can't learn cooperative strategies to solve these problems too?

Because we're individuals operating on a total budget of hundreds of
dollars, or a few thousands of dollars, of computer equipment. Not
multinational corporations.

> How about the guys who develop a complex chemical process? Or who
> design an airplane?

They tend to have larger budgets.

> Or the home electronics hobbyist putting together
> thousands of componets over a year?

Thousands of *identical* components purchased elsewhere.

The home computer hobbyist is putting together *millions* of non-identical
components over the same period, most of which he probably developed himself.

> They can do it, but software developers can't?  

Not and sustain the rate of growth that we've had so far... a rate of
growth that *still* seems too slow.

> Software patents may have their problems, but the fact that some
> software developers would rather solve a software problem than solve a
> business problem like licensing seems to me to be one of the poorest

Please, think about the magnitude of the problem. You're talking about
raising the cost of software development by thousands of times, if you
want to be safe.

We're working hard at speeding up software development. You're tring to
slow it to a crawl.
-- 
Peter da Silva                                               `-_-'
Ferranti Intl. Ctls. Corp.                                    'U` 
Sugar Land, TX  77487-5012
+1 713 274 5180                                   Har du kramat din varg idag?