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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

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.

aidenn0 10y ago
> Companies can have trade secrets but they can't sue each other over them. Slight nit-pick: they actually can, when a company acquires knowledge of another's trade secrets through underhanded means.
wpietri 10y ago
> equivalent in a purely capitalist system I was using "capitalism" by its common meaning. I understand there are fantasy versions of capitalism that might be different. > 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. Basic innovation is wildly different than commercialization. I'm a big fan of publicly funded basic research. But going from a scientific discovery to a commercially usable technology is a) often very expensive, and b) not something that academia is good at. Personally, I think commercial investment helps quite a bit. Look at the wave of mobile hardware innovation we've seen in the decade since the iPhone came out. That took tens of billions of R&D dollars, and investors and shareholders don't put up that kind of money without expecting to get it back.
- dkarapetyan 10y ago
  No fantasy necessary. In any version of capitalism government enforced monopoly for an idea and implementation is basically not capitalism whether it is fantastical or practical. Most modern democracies have not had any version of capitalism for a long time. The US economic system is more socialist than anything else really. I also was not arguing for replacing one system with another since that never works out. The new thing ends up being as bad as the old thing but slightly different. I'm arguing for more stringent requirements for patents and higher bars for suing someone based on patent infringement claims. That already goes a long way towards preventing patent abuse. > shareholders don't put up that kind of money without expecting to get it back. Therein lies the problem and what I mean by "short term business thinking". MIPS investors could have settled for getting back much less money for their investment but instead they chose the greedy approach and we collectively ended up worse off.
  - wpietri 10y ago
    > Most modern democracies have not had any version of capitalism for a long time. You seem to have an unconventional definition of the word. Again, I am using the common definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism That said, I'm actually fine with a higher bar for patents. > MIPS investors could have settled for getting back much less money for their investment but instead they chose the greedy approach and we collectively ended up worse off. Could you show your math here? I can't find any evidence that MIPS in this incarnation actually returned money to investors. When SGI spun it out, it looks like its market cap was somewhere north of $300m. Eventually it was bought for $100m. I can't find any record of a dividend in between. I also am not sure you understand how venture capital works. As an asset class, VC doesn't do much better than other investments. The absurdly great hits (e.g., Google) pay for the 80% of companies that don't make it. Without taking the very big payouts on the few successes, it's not clear to me who would put money into VC funds. A lot of their money comes from pension funds, school endowments and the like; those people have long-term obligations to meet. So how do you propose to maintain significant levels of venture funding if it returns "much less money" than it does now?

aidenn0 10y ago

> Companies can have trade secrets but they can't sue each other over them. Slight nit-pick: they actually can, when a company acquires knowledge of another's trade secrets through underhanded means.

wpietri 10y ago

> equivalent in a purely capitalist system I was using "capitalism" by its common meaning. I understand there are fantasy versions of capitalism that might be different. > 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. Basic innovation is wildly different than commercialization. I'm a big fan of publicly funded basic research. But going from a scientific discovery to a commercially usable technology is a) often very expensive, and b) not something that academia is good at. Personally, I think commercial investment helps quite a bit. Look at the wave of mobile hardware innovation we've seen in the decade since the iPhone came out. That took tens of billions of R&D dollars, and investors and shareholders don't put up that kind of money without expecting to get it back.

dkarapetyan 10y ago
No fantasy necessary. In any version of capitalism government enforced monopoly for an idea and implementation is basically not capitalism whether it is fantastical or practical. Most modern democracies have not had any version of capitalism for a long time. The US economic system is more socialist than anything else really. I also was not arguing for replacing one system with another since that never works out. The new thing ends up being as bad as the old thing but slightly different. I'm arguing for more stringent requirements for patents and higher bars for suing someone based on patent infringement claims. That already goes a long way towards preventing patent abuse. > shareholders don't put up that kind of money without expecting to get it back. Therein lies the problem and what I mean by "short term business thinking". MIPS investors could have settled for getting back much less money for their investment but instead they chose the greedy approach and we collectively ended up worse off.
- wpietri 10y ago
  > Most modern democracies have not had any version of capitalism for a long time. You seem to have an unconventional definition of the word. Again, I am using the common definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism That said, I'm actually fine with a higher bar for patents. > MIPS investors could have settled for getting back much less money for their investment but instead they chose the greedy approach and we collectively ended up worse off. Could you show your math here? I can't find any evidence that MIPS in this incarnation actually returned money to investors. When SGI spun it out, it looks like its market cap was somewhere north of $300m. Eventually it was bought for $100m. I can't find any record of a dividend in between. I also am not sure you understand how venture capital works. As an asset class, VC doesn't do much better than other investments. The absurdly great hits (e.g., Google) pay for the 80% of companies that don't make it. Without taking the very big payouts on the few successes, it's not clear to me who would put money into VC funds. A lot of their money comes from pension funds, school endowments and the like; those people have long-term obligations to meet. So how do you propose to maintain significant levels of venture funding if it returns "much less money" than it does now?