From: jbotz@mtholyoke.edu (Jurgen Botz)
Subject: Re: Concerns about the FSF and the GNU project
Organization: Mount Holyoke College
Date: Sat, 12 Dec 1992 04:30:49 GMT

In article <DREIER.92Dec10121615@phnom-penh.berkeley.edu> dreier@phnom-penh.berkeley.edu (Roland Dreier) writes:
>My livelihood depends on my ability to support myself by
>creating ideas that others find valuable.  Just as the LPF/FSF feel
>that fighting Apple over look-and-feel lawsuits is a matter of
>survival, keeping intellectual property rights is a matter of survival
>for me.  I would starve in a week if my life depended on producing
>something tangible.

Well, I understand your point of view, but I believe that you are
misguided.  There /is/ protection for your livelihood, in the form
of source-code copyrights, which I believe (and apparently so does
the LPF) is appropriate and adequate.

However, I see that you are at Berkeley... chances are pretty good
that you do not own a highly capitalized large software company.
(Please correct me if I'm wrong.)  The problem with software patents
and user-interface copyrights is that those /do/ have the potential of
robbing you of your livelihood, because soon the day will come when so
many algorithms and UI "look and feels" are owned by large
corporations that you simply will no longer be able to write software
without infringing on one of them.  What's worse is that you won't
even know it when you do... chances are that you won't have the
resources to do an exhaustive patent search in advance to ensure that
your design does not utilize elements that are already owned by
someone else.

In other words, if things continue as they are going now, a few years
down the line you may well find yourself getting sued for sums of money
that will drive into permanent bankruptcy because a program you wrote
uses an algorithm that infringes on a patent you had no idea even existed.
And given the ludicrousness of some of these patents (such as the network
byte-order one), it may be something you considered so self-eviddent that
you would never even dream of patenting it yourself, even though you 
appear to be an advocate of software-patent protection.

I feel that examining the history of this issue objectively one can
only come to the conclusion that software patents are bad: they benefit
no one except those large corporations that have the resources to employ
armies of lawyers and to regularly buy patents just on the chance that
they might need them someday (or that the might be able to prevent the
competition from using the technique!).  If your objective in live is to
be a major share-holder in such a corporation, then I can see why you
might advocate software patents (although if you aren't yet, you're
probably a bit late.)  But if you objetive is to be a successful and
prolific author of inovative software (and to make a good living at it),
then I really can't see how you could possibly be in support of this
travesty.

--
Jurgen Botz                  |   Internet: JBotz@mtholyoke.edu
Academic Systems Consultant  |     Bitnet: JBotz@mhc.bitnet
Mount Holyoke College        |      Voice: (US) 413-538-2375 (daytime)
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