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Software patents, and patents in general, are a plague on the industry and should be abolished due to a lack of empirical evidence to justify their existence. A
by errantmind 4y ago
Software patents, and patents in general, are a plague on the industry and should be abolished due to a lack of empirical evidence to justify their existence. As a thought experiment they make sense, but thought experiments often diverge from reality.
The Case Against Patents:
https://research.stlouisfed.org/wp/more/2012-035 https://research.stlouisfed.org/wp/more/2012-035
- CorrectHorseBat 4y agoSeems like they are going after hardware implementations, not software (not that that's much better).
- chrismorgan 4y agoSo they claim. But they’re also explicitly including software in the scope of the pool itself.
- russdill 4y agoThat's can be a super hard line to draw as many hardware implementations are just firmware running on hardware with some specialized dsp instructions.
- Namidairo 4y agoI wonder if this could stifle (hardware) use of the RFC Opus over A2DP vendor codec that was slowly coming together on Pipewire. (Which is kind of in the chicken-egg position where there's no hardware to receive it outside of other pipewire clients anyway.) Edit: It's already merged and ready for use, and is the only thing that'll do multi-channel audio over bluetooth?
- nyanpasu64 4y agoI'm hoping to add support for Opus to the upcoming PineBuds Pro, but no guarantees I'll be able to accomplish it at my current skill level. So far I couldn't even get the first SDK to compile (https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PineBuds_Pro https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PineBuds_Pro).
- Namidairo 4y agoI would have thought that something like that would have been all offloaded to hardware or in a weird DSP assembly (Like how Qualcomm have their newer aptx codecs as Hexagon DSP code), but I see a LDAC decoder as a regular ARM object in there. Good luck to you I guess.
- anilakar 4y agoSounds like they didn't have the balls to sue Microsoft. (Opus is SILK+CELT and SILK was developed by Skype, which was bought by MS)
- aaa_aaa 4y agoHere is a debate on IP with two different libertarian perspective: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ep2-ohgFOys https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ep2-ohgFOys `Abolish the IP laws` side provides some pointers to related research and empirical evidence against IP.
- throwaway0asd 4y agoPatents don’t solve for innovation. What they solve for is time for marketing and market adoption of a novelty, which is what people (investors) mistakenly refer to as innovation.
- smarx007 4y agoNo, they refer to it is as IP protection.
- WithinReason 4y ago> Software patents, and patents in general, are a plague on the industry [...] The article is specifically about hardware and excludes software: The planned Opus program will focus on hardware devices and will not be directed towards open-source software, applications, services, or content
- chrismorgan 4y agoThe pool, however, explicitly includes software <https://www.opuspool.com/ https://www.opuspool.com/>: > The Opus pool license covers the specifications […], and the official software releases of the Opus audio codec, […]
- contravariant 4y agoThat sounds like a meaningless distinction if the patent covers software running in general purpose hardware.
- masklinn 4y agoThe article talks about suing hardware manufacturers, it doesn't say the patent pool excludes software (it doesn't).