From: jasonp@bungee.NoSubdomain.NoDomain (Jason Pascucci)
Subject: Re: Novell just bought Unix?
Organization: Prime Computer R&D
Date: Thu, 24 Dec 1992 20:30:40 GMT

In article <BzrvK9.7xv@mtholyoke.edu>, jbotz@mtholyoke.edu (Jurgen Botz) writes:
|> In article <1hbllvINNfj5@uwm.edu> jgd@csd4.csd.uwm.edu writes:
|> >There is an active patent infringement lawsuit against Novell claiming
|> >that Novell NetWare infringes this client-server patent.  According to
|> >what I've read, the patent's claims are _very_ broad, and some legal
|> >experts think that if this goes to trial, the patent holder (an
|> >independent engineer, _not_ another corporate behemouth) may well win.
|> 
|> a) Does anybody have more info on this?
|> 
|> b) If this is really as described, maybe it would be A Good Thing if this
|> independent engineer won such a suit... it could well mean that that 
|> corporate America would start to rethink the value of software patents
|> if such a thing happened, no?

I don't think so. We can't praise one person for the same thing which
we condemn whole corporations. Software Patents only do one
thing, which is cause greed to flourish at the price
of progress. (No, before you ask, I am not a member of LPF.)
A broad client-server patent? Stupid! Insane! It's like
trying to patent 'a device which moves liquid through a pipe'.

What ever happened to a 'fair fight'? If my product/marketing is better
than yours, then I win. If you have something which has
the same functionality for less money, than you win,
other things being equal. Yes, it's sometimes easier to replicate
a piece of software than to design and implement it, but
for non-trivial systems, it shouldn't be that much different...
considering the lead time that the first company would have.
If some 5 man company, today, wrote an MS windows clone, and undersold 
MS-windows by $50, and it performed better, they deserve to take some
of MS's market share, and MS deserves to either do something 
different to recapture the market, live with it, or die. I'd much 
rather see 100 different companies going tooth and nail to
capture a marketplace than 3 big ones. De facto standards should
be a thing of the past, rational, well thought out standards are
in vogue, and were a long-time coming. 

My point, which I knew I'd get to eventually, is that Patents don't level 
the playing fields,  but skew it towards huge corporations who can afford 
to patent out the wazoo, and that have such overhead as to not be able to
produce a working, reasonable, and improved product in a
fair length of time so as to insure a good market share. 

I realize where you are coming from, though, Jurgen, that maybe
if the big boys can be bitten by software patents, they might
also fight for their abolition, but I think it's far more likely
that they won't, and that the more insane patents will be taken
to court...after all, I believe (I don't have any figures to 
back it up, but it would be logical) that most software patents are 
owned by corporations. And since 1) it takes money to get a software
patent, and 2) It takes money to file suit for infringement
of a patent, that the 'little guy' is still at a major
disadvantage. 

|> Jurgen Botz                  |   Internet: JBotz@mtholyoke.edu

Anyways, enough editorial.
--
Jason R. Pascucci
jasonp@primerd.prime.com
Disclaimer: The above are opinions, and do not reflect CV Corporate Policy.
Newsgroups: comp.unix.misc,comp.sys.novell