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It sounds like you are like many others in tech who believe everything should be open source. Good for you but some of us need to make money off of our life's
by djyaz1200 9y ago
It sounds like you are like many others in tech who believe everything should be open source. Good for you but some of us need to make money off of our life's work in innovation.
Time will tell, I view this in a hopeful way as a shift in direction.
I think companies that invest in innovative products big or small should be able to defend those innovations against being ripped off.
Yes, fights over this will be resource intensive but there are ways to fund expensive litigation if winning is plausible. And of course the expense of litigation touches on all kinds of unrelated problems.
"This also works to inhibit innovation, as companies can lock out competitors via legal machinations, as opposed to needing to innovate continuously."
You're flat out wrong here. Companies will need to create their own innovations rather than ripping off others. This will give power to the the people actually innovating and encourage companies to invest in their own R&D.
RE the 4th circuit, yes it's not the Supreme Court but it's a big decision in the right direction in my view... and suggests this and/or related issues may be heard by the supreme court.
Ultimately software is not the open source cooperative utopia that many people like you hoped for. It is a ruthless for profit marketplace, and if you ever want to give the guy in the garage a chance you have to give him a mechanism to protect his ideas... and the patent system is not that mechanism right now. Perhaps terms of use will be?
Maybe not, in any case the status quo is letting giant tech companies power and influence grow without limits... and that needs to change.
- xfer 9y agoYou seem to think that you can not sell open-source software. Yet all the linux based companies are doing that for decades now. There are many other examples.
- djyaz1200 9y agoThey sell support really, the software is free.
- mindcrime 9y agoIt sounds like you are like many others in tech who believe everything should be open source. Good for you but some of us need to make money off of our life's work in innovation. I'm not a FSF zealot or anything, not somebody who abhors the very existence of proprietary / closed-source software. That said, I do prefer OSS / Free Sofware in the general sense... but the rub is, software being F/OSS doesn't mean you can't make money from it. So I'm not really sure where you're coming from. Maybe not, in any case the status quo is letting giant tech companies power and influence grow without limits... and that needs to change. But this ruling benefits the tech giants at the expense of the "little guy". How many startups already never come into being because of fears of being sued by AmaGoogFaceSoft? And consider that most "innovation" is an incremental improvement to an existing "thing" and not some whole new thing cut from whole cloth. If you can't reverse engineer / clone products made by AmaGoogFaceSoft, Oracle, IBM, SAS, etc., it's going to be even harder for smaller companies to contribute their innovations.
- ConceptJunkie 9y agoThat depends on the what the meaning of "ripped off" is. What is "ripping off" and what is legitimate competition? This question has been the subject of many lawsuits for several decades and isn't going away any time soon. I agree with you that the power of the large companies remains largely unchecked and that that's a bad thing.