Ubuntu Founder Says Microsoft Not A Big Threat 128
Golygydd Max writes "Who says that Microsoft and open source developers are enemies? It's not Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth. He says that Microsoft is not the patent threat Linux and open source developers should be worried about, and that the software giant will itself be fighting against the software patents system within a few years. 'He said the most dangerous litigants are companies not themselves in the software business, small ventures or holding companies that get their principal revenue from patent licensing. He singled out former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold and his company Intellectual Ventures, which is stockpiling patents at a rate that alarms large companies such as IBM and HP, as an example of such a potentially dangerous company.'"
Re:Reform the System (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Uh oh. (Score:2, Insightful)
Patent Copyright (Score:5, Insightful)
Will patents finally be a two edged sword (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Uh oh. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Lobbyists (Score:5, Insightful)
Really Bad Idea. This breaks the basic premise that a non-obvious improvement to an existing design may itself be patentable, even if the existing design is patented by someone else. You may be able to patent it, sure, but you would never profit from it.
Take the old example of the automobile. It's a good idea, and was at one point patentable. Then, someone else invests the automatic transmission. It's a non-obvious improvement to the design, and is separately patentable. But the guy who invented the automatic transmission cannot build cars, because that would violate the patent held by the car inventor. The guy could try to sell the automatic transmission alone, but he would probably go out of business unless the car inventor chose to buy those transmissions. Why would the car inventor do that? If he just waits a few years, the automatic transmission inventor will go out of business, and, using your proposal, the car inventor could exploit the patent without fear of repercussion.
The basic premise for patents is not just to grant a monopoly in exchange for publishing your data eventually. The data is published up front in part to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.
Your proposal breaks that incentive, because, until your patent expires, no one else can build on your design without forfeiting their improvements to you.
Lulled into a false sense of security (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:No conspiracy here? (Score:3, Insightful)
That's a little bit like asking "Is there any chance that Microsoft helped Bill Gates start the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation?" The answer is mu.
While Microsoft probably has no direct involvement in Myhrvold's company, the stock options Myhrvold collected as part of his compensation from MSFT probably at least helped pay for the startup costs for his new company, and Myhrvold has probably solicited and gotten the help of many of his colleagues at Microsoft, both in the form of advice and other indirect support and in the form of monetary investment.
Re:Reform the System (Score:3, Insightful)
More like it's not flexible enough to deal with todays rate of communications, and the development of mankinds knowledge turning into a million small, trivial, and disclosed steps.
What makes the software sector special is the extremely low barrier of entry into the market, the massively componentized approach to development and the prevalence of use of modern communications and collaboration methods. This, however, does not mean that the same change isn't happening/can't happen in other sectors, nor that patents wont be as damaging and hinder progress as much there.
In fact, a realistic economic analysis of the investment patterns in the protected sectors strongly suggest a suboptimal use of capital, where much more is geared towards capitalizing on the monopoly of patents than in researching to gain more patents.
So while disqualifying software from patenting might be a useful start, restructuring the innovation incentive systems to actually reward useful research without causing the economic damage inherent in monopolies, extending across all sectors, would be much better in the long term. Because while I'd like to enjoy a future with software being continually improved, I might enjoy a future where we'd be getting five times the medical research for the same money we already spend today even more.
Re:Reform the System (Score:3, Insightful)
What's perhaps funny about this (very long run-on) sentence is that, at its heart, EVERYTHING IS SOFTWARE. Listen to particle physicists nowadays - they all talk about "information entropy". Heck, the big deal about Hawking radiation is that it allows for (gasp!) information leaks at the event horizon of a black hole, and thus the eventual collapse of the black hole back into "normal" space!
The entire universe can now be narrowly (and apparently, quite accurately) defined as a massive information machine. Perhaps Douglas Adams, for all his absurd literature, was actually pretty close to the mark?
Anyhow, if the entire universe is definable in the same terms as software is, fundamentally nothing more than bits of information, what is really the line between software and other "physical" processes?
In reality, they are the same thing!
I say, don't let patents be transferrable (Score:2, Insightful)
That solves the original problem of "protect the little guy" while simultaneously preventing these patent-hoarding entities from causing any damage. If they want to buy a patent they have to hire the owner. That'll make patent-hoarding pretty expensive.
Mark spoke at our conference last week... (Score:5, Insightful)
Mark spoke for 30 minutes, and his keynote is available here [eupaco.blip.tv]. He provided this very elegant argument against patents on business methods and most software: patents are society's gift to inventors in exchange for disclosure. When an invention is self-disclosing, i.e. you understand it when you use it, society has no interest in granting a patent for it, indeed is penalised by doing so, and therefore should not grant it.
More on the conference here [digitalmajority.org].
Re:Reform the System (Score:3, Insightful)
Not something to be complacent about, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
The difference is that certain large traditional software companies have a motive to burn some of their spare cash - or risk or having a few patents invalidated - in order to cripple the pesky open source industry. Patent trolls - sock-puppet shenanigans aside - are only in it for the direct profit.
At worst, trolls are an equal threat to the whole software industry, not just open source. At best, the open source industry should be less attractive to them - attack an open source company with a plausible patent case and there is a risk that they'll go titsup.com before you get your damages. You certainly won't see any continuing royalties. Worse, lots of big players who would just sit back and eat peanuts while you went after a commercial competitor, have a vested interest in the same bits of FOSS and might gang up on you while every geek on the internet searches for prior art. Best stick to closed-soruce companies who have a budget for patent extortion.
The real glass-half-full aspect is that these clowns are helping discredit the patent system, and upsetting the Mutually Assured Destruction status quo that keeps the big players on the pro-patent side.
The Prime Example (Score:5, Insightful)
p>What is the #2 result? A patent on how to find and protect intellectual property [google.com] (aka patents).
So, this company already has a patent on patenting patents. So all you slashdotters with the Step 1, Step2, .... Profit jokes owe them money.