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I think this is why humans fail. I think we'd be much further along if the kind of short term mindset driven by short term business goals outlined in this artic

I think this is why humans fail. I think we'd be much further along if the kind of short term mindset driven by short term business goals outlined in this article were the exception instead of the rule. Patents in software and hardware design should not exist at all given the mathematical and physical underpinning of both disciplines. There is creativity involved and the original inventors should get due credit but not to the point of being able to sue an equally good competitor with equally good inventors into oblivion. Everyone is worse off because of what happened here.

rayiner 10y ago
There isn't some abstract mathematical truth at issue in the MIPS patents, but a clever way of doing unaligned loans in an otherwise word-oriented machine. And the value of the patent isn't "giving inventors credit" but instead enabling a particular sort of business model: the R&D-only company. None of the companies discussed in the article: MIPS, Lexra, and ARM, would exist without IP protection. They'd never make any money if companies could just copy their designs for free. The only viable model would be to vertically integrate and build complete processors like Intel does. And that probably would've made it impossible to build up the rich ecosystem of compatible cores that you see with ARM.
- dkarapetyan 10y ago
  The issue is that given two hardware engineers both of them would have come up with the same clever design. In fact I'm almost certain this could be posed as a constraint satisfaction problem and I could even get a SAT solver to come up with the same design. The mathematical constraints basically force the design. So I disagree with you. It is indeed an abstract truth. The foundations are axiomatic. There are only so many theorems (clever tricks) you can come up with given the foundation. The law overstepped because of fundamental misunderstandings of how the engineering, theory, and practice are combined in something like software and hardware design. I also did not say there shouldn't be limited forms of protection to enable the license based business model but being able to outmaneuver your competitor legally instead of through proper design and engineering is why progress is hampered and why the patent model is fundamentally broken.
  - rayiner 10y ago
    But they didn't. Berkeley RISC predates MIPS and simply punts on the issue of unaligned loads. Other contemporary designs handled them in microcode.
    - dkarapetyan 10y ago
      That's fine. Plenty of mathematical theories still have theorems left to prove. It still doesn't change the fundamental and theoretical nature of the discipline. I'm trying to drive the point home that much of hardware and software design is a lot like "a^2 + b^2 = c^2" and patents in that context don't make sense.
      - rayiner 10y ago
        In my opinion, you have to distinguish between situations where you use math to evaluate particular points in a design space, and situations where there is a correct solution that follows directly from the math. Most things in software are not examples of the former. They're just different points in a design space of solutions, just like with any other engineering field. The MIPS unaligned load instructions are an example of that. Just one way to do things. Not even a particular good way, considering that they've long been out of patent protection and nobody has implemented them in another architecture.
    - aidenn0 10y ago
      I have little problem with protection for how MIPS handles unaligned loads; I have a huge problem with the mere existence of that patent making it financially untenable for Lexra to defend an implementation of the same instructions with a trap, something that I hope we can all agree is unfortunate.
    - makomk 10y ago
      Except that Lexra didn't implement unaligned loads at all. According to the post, MIPS considered the mere possibility that you could handle unaligned loads through an OS-level trap that emulated the load - not even in microcode - to infringe their patent and managed to shake up several of Lexra's customers that way. (This is another flaw of patent law. In order for something to count as prior art it has to be identical to the claimed technology, but the same requirement doesn't apply to infringement claims.)
wpietri 10y ago
I too think we will eventually come up with something better than capitalism. But until we figure out what that would be, I don't know that throwing out parts of the existing system helps much, even if those are parts we happen to not like. In particular, R&D is expensive. If patents in hardware don't exist, it's going to be much harder for investors to justify putting in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars that it takes to start a modern tech company. No patents mean that investment in innovation makes much less sense for startups and small companies, because larger players can use their larger resources and deeper relationships to copy that innovation and crush the innovators. Another way to look at it: sure, the current system has bad outcomes. But so did the previous system, one without patents. That's why we invented patents in the first place. If you want to persuade people to change, it's not enough to say, "patents bad". You have to propose an alternative and say why the total outcomes under your system are substantially better than the total outcomes under the status quo.
- wtetzner 10y ago
  Honestly I think software/hardware patents wouldn't be nearly so problematic if patents expired sooner, say a few years instead of 20. Twenty years is way more than what's needed for the R&D to be profitable.
- dkarapetyan 10y ago
  I have nothing against capitalism but it's a little ironic you bring up patents and capitalism in the same paragraph since patents are almost the antithesis of free form market capitalism. The equivalent in a purely capitalist system I believe is a trade secret which is different from a patent. Companies can have trade secrets but they can't sue each other over them. In fact I think that's the crux of the problem. There is no such thing as a trade secret in software and hardware. As soon as there is an existence proof equivalent implementations are sure to follow. This goes back to what I've been arguing in this thread. The design space is very limited and the mathematical, physical, axiomatic nature of the field means there are only so many things you can actually design and implement and as soon as it is implemented everyone else can trace back the design to first principles. As for R&D. Many of the best innovation in computers came from publicly funded projects. So I don't think the commercial nature of modern computing is actually helping anything. We had a system that worked and it was replaced by what we have now. I could just point people to historical precedent but we all know how well that works.

rayiner 10y ago

There isn't some abstract mathematical truth at issue in the MIPS patents, but a clever way of doing unaligned loans in an otherwise word-oriented machine. And the value of the patent isn't "giving inventors credit" but instead enabling a particular sort of business model: the R&D-only company. None of the companies discussed in the article: MIPS, Lexra, and ARM, would exist without IP protection. They'd never make any money if companies could just copy their designs for free. The only viable model would be to vertically integrate and build complete processors like Intel does. And that probably would've made it impossible to build up the rich ecosystem of compatible cores that you see with ARM.

dkarapetyan 10y ago
The issue is that given two hardware engineers both of them would have come up with the same clever design. In fact I'm almost certain this could be posed as a constraint satisfaction problem and I could even get a SAT solver to come up with the same design. The mathematical constraints basically force the design. So I disagree with you. It is indeed an abstract truth. The foundations are axiomatic. There are only so many theorems (clever tricks) you can come up with given the foundation. The law overstepped because of fundamental misunderstandings of how the engineering, theory, and practice are combined in something like software and hardware design. I also did not say there shouldn't be limited forms of protection to enable the license based business model but being able to outmaneuver your competitor legally instead of through proper design and engineering is why progress is hampered and why the patent model is fundamentally broken.
- rayiner 10y ago
  But they didn't. Berkeley RISC predates MIPS and simply punts on the issue of unaligned loads. Other contemporary designs handled them in microcode.
  - dkarapetyan 10y ago
    That's fine. Plenty of mathematical theories still have theorems left to prove. It still doesn't change the fundamental and theoretical nature of the discipline. I'm trying to drive the point home that much of hardware and software design is a lot like "a^2 + b^2 = c^2" and patents in that context don't make sense.
    - rayiner 10y ago
      In my opinion, you have to distinguish between situations where you use math to evaluate particular points in a design space, and situations where there is a correct solution that follows directly from the math. Most things in software are not examples of the former. They're just different points in a design space of solutions, just like with any other engineering field. The MIPS unaligned load instructions are an example of that. Just one way to do things. Not even a particular good way, considering that they've long been out of patent protection and nobody has implemented them in another architecture.
  - aidenn0 10y ago
    I have little problem with protection for how MIPS handles unaligned loads; I have a huge problem with the mere existence of that patent making it financially untenable for Lexra to defend an implementation of the same instructions with a trap, something that I hope we can all agree is unfortunate.
  - makomk 10y ago
    Except that Lexra didn't implement unaligned loads at all. According to the post, MIPS considered the mere possibility that you could handle unaligned loads through an OS-level trap that emulated the load - not even in microcode - to infringe their patent and managed to shake up several of Lexra's customers that way. (This is another flaw of patent law. In order for something to count as prior art it has to be identical to the claimed technology, but the same requirement doesn't apply to infringement claims.)

wpietri 10y ago

I too think we will eventually come up with something better than capitalism. But until we figure out what that would be, I don't know that throwing out parts of the existing system helps much, even if those are parts we happen to not like. In particular, R&D is expensive. If patents in hardware don't exist, it's going to be much harder for investors to justify putting in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars that it takes to start a modern tech company. No patents mean that investment in innovation makes much less sense for startups and small companies, because larger players can use their larger resources and deeper relationships to copy that innovation and crush the innovators. Another way to look at it: sure, the current system has bad outcomes. But so did the previous system, one without patents. That's why we invented patents in the first place. If you want to persuade people to change, it's not enough to say, "patents bad". You have to propose an alternative and say why the total outcomes under your system are substantially better than the total outcomes under the status quo.

wtetzner 10y ago
Honestly I think software/hardware patents wouldn't be nearly so problematic if patents expired sooner, say a few years instead of 20. Twenty years is way more than what's needed for the R&D to be profitable.
dkarapetyan 10y ago
I have nothing against capitalism but it's a little ironic you bring up patents and capitalism in the same paragraph since patents are almost the antithesis of free form market capitalism. The equivalent in a purely capitalist system I believe is a trade secret which is different from a patent. Companies can have trade secrets but they can't sue each other over them. In fact I think that's the crux of the problem. There is no such thing as a trade secret in software and hardware. As soon as there is an existence proof equivalent implementations are sure to follow. This goes back to what I've been arguing in this thread. The design space is very limited and the mathematical, physical, axiomatic nature of the field means there are only so many things you can actually design and implement and as soon as it is implemented everyone else can trace back the design to first principles. As for R&D. Many of the best innovation in computers came from publicly funded projects. So I don't think the commercial nature of modern computing is actually helping anything. We had a system that worked and it was replaced by what we have now. I could just point people to historical precedent but we all know how well that works.