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No. In tech when the creator quits or dies they’re replaced by MBAs that squeeze every penny out of the creation. (Like authors whose grandchildren direct the t

No. In tech when the creator quits or dies they’re replaced by MBAs that squeeze every penny out of the creation. (Like authors whose grandchildren direct the trusts which own the copyright a century after the work was written) New creations in tech have to wait for patents to expire and the incumbents to crumble to the point where they don’t have the cash to buy out the competition any more.

qup 4y ago
To be fair, Ayn Rand said basically the same thing about industry long before tech bros existed.
kortilla 4y ago
A bit tone deaf considering the thread is about algorithms that are open.
- londons_explore 4y ago
  Plenty of things are totally open, yet innovation is still directed by the inventor.
  - kortilla 4y ago
    Still not at all relevant to this case. Algorithms have no such gate keeping because there is no barrier to entry. Algo developers aren’t fighting for some tiny pot of NSF money allocated to particle physics to build a 100 million dollar algorithm detector.
    - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
      This is only partially true. A great example is Arithmetic coding in compression where research pretty much stalled for almost 40 years (from the mid 1970s until the 2010s) due to patent concerns.
- pizza 4y ago
  Well, plenty of compression algorithms have been patented or attempted to be patented - e.g. arithmetic codes and Microsoft's rANS patent
- vintermann 4y ago
  LZW was claimed by Unisys for many years. It wasn't Ziv's fault, it wasn't even Welch's, but it does highlight that compression has historically been a garbage fire of patent harassment. I certainly think it has held the field back. The patent harassment might even be a factor in the curiosity mentioned elsewhere in this thread, that a lot of practical progress in file compression has been published in a Russian web forum.
- xxs 4y ago
  I personally wrote an implementation of lzw in Assembly in my late teens. It could deal with gifs... that was before 1999, when Unisys[0] claimed the patent (for all kind of uses) and had the patent for many a year, PNG was created not to use lzw since it was patented. The algorithm was patented for the encoding part but not decoding. [0]: https://eng.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Electrical_Engineering/Signal_Processing_and_Modeling/Information_and_Entropy_(Penfield)/03%3A_Compression/3.05%3A_Dynamic_Dictionary/3.5.01%3A_The_LZW_Patent https://eng.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Electrical_Engineerin...

qup 4y ago

To be fair, Ayn Rand said basically the same thing about industry long before tech bros existed.

kortilla 4y ago

A bit tone deaf considering the thread is about algorithms that are open.

londons_explore 4y ago
Plenty of things are totally open, yet innovation is still directed by the inventor.
- kortilla 4y ago
  Still not at all relevant to this case. Algorithms have no such gate keeping because there is no barrier to entry. Algo developers aren’t fighting for some tiny pot of NSF money allocated to particle physics to build a 100 million dollar algorithm detector.
  - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
    This is only partially true. A great example is Arithmetic coding in compression where research pretty much stalled for almost 40 years (from the mid 1970s until the 2010s) due to patent concerns.
pizza 4y ago
Well, plenty of compression algorithms have been patented or attempted to be patented - e.g. arithmetic codes and Microsoft's rANS patent
vintermann 4y ago
LZW was claimed by Unisys for many years. It wasn't Ziv's fault, it wasn't even Welch's, but it does highlight that compression has historically been a garbage fire of patent harassment. I certainly think it has held the field back. The patent harassment might even be a factor in the curiosity mentioned elsewhere in this thread, that a lot of practical progress in file compression has been published in a Russian web forum.
xxs 4y ago
I personally wrote an implementation of lzw in Assembly in my late teens. It could deal with gifs... that was before 1999, when Unisys[0] claimed the patent (for all kind of uses) and had the patent for many a year, PNG was created not to use lzw since it was patented. The algorithm was patented for the encoding part but not decoding. [0]: https://eng.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Electrical_Engineering/Signal_Processing_and_Modeling/Information_and_Entropy_(Penfield)/03%3A_Compression/3.05%3A_Dynamic_Dictionary/3.5.01%3A_The_LZW_Patent https://eng.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Electrical_Engineerin...