3 ms·

Ignoring the first-to-market incentive (which is substantial), is there any monetary incentive now? Has anyone else ever tried to make a business out of somehow

by nknight 15y ago

Ignoring the first-to-market incentive (which is substantial), is there any monetary incentive now? Has anyone else ever tried to make a business out of somehow "licensing" a general-purpose programming language minus implementation? The concept doesn't even make sense. Do you pay someone to let you speak English? Why would you pay someone to let you "speak" any other language?

arihant 15y ago
What if I ship a language with implementation but would like to prevent others from implementing it? Sometimes language implementations are the product - things like R, Matlab and Mathematica are close examples. What if I figured out a much better programming language for Finance software and would like to prevent every other company from implementing it? This debate is far more complex than what people think.
- chimeracoder 15y ago
  R's source code is released under the GPL. MATLAB has a GNU-licensed equivalent (GNU Octave), which has been around since 1988. How could you patent a language? What are you patenting? The compiler/interpreter? The context-free grammar (assuming it has one)? The language specification? If the specification, then you really mean a copyright, not a patent, because a language specification is just a description of a language, and you can't patent that. But just because you've placed a copyright on your description doesn't mean you hold a copyright on anything that anybody creates after having read that description - that would be ludicrous! Sure, we can talk about the compiler/interpreter itself, but that doesn't prevent someone else from going ahead and creating a completely separate compiler that implements the same exact specification (look at the GNU Compiler Collection, more commonly known as gcc).
- dminor 15y ago
  What you want and what the law allows may be two different things. Ideas are not subject to copyright. Specific implementations might be.
- orangecat 15y ago
  The value of Mathematica is not that "Integrate[Sin[x^2], x]" is especially brilliant syntax.
  - fluidcruft 15y ago
    Wolfram Research is infamous for claiming copyright to the language of Mathematica threatening to sue the University of California. They have also have a long history of causing automatic translators and shims for converting Mathematica syntax code into other systems to disappear (supposedly based on the language copyright).
    - nknight 15y ago
      Do you have any meaningful citation for these events? The only mention I can find of the incident you seem to be alluding to is a brief, vague, and un-sourced mention in a text file dating to 1991[1]. I'd be entirely unsurprised to learn that there is far more nuance to the story than what you and said file state, or that the incident was largely the result of a game of telephone. [1] http://progfree.org/Copyright/against-user-interface-copyright.txt http://progfree.org/Copyright/against-user-interface-copyrig...
- joe_the_user 15y ago
  It's not terribly complex. The answer to your question is no. If you ship a language with implementation and would like to prevent others from implementing it, you should not be able to and fortunately even under US law it seems you cannot. The motivation for a state-provided monopoly on "inventions" was to foster innovation (and we should be clear this institution is a state intervention in the market and has nothing to do with "natural rights" and such). The ability of patents to provide society with this benefit is debatable but fortunately there's clear consensus that patenting/copyrighting/owning ideas is bad. And a programming language is essentially an idea rather than an artifice and it certainly seems intuitively obvious that giving people ownership of language would get really nasty, really quickly.

by nknight 15y ago

arihant 15y ago

What if I ship a language with implementation but would like to prevent others from implementing it? Sometimes language implementations are the product - things like R, Matlab and Mathematica are close examples. What if I figured out a much better programming language for Finance software and would like to prevent every other company from implementing it? This debate is far more complex than what people think.

chimeracoder 15y ago
R's source code is released under the GPL. MATLAB has a GNU-licensed equivalent (GNU Octave), which has been around since 1988. How could you patent a language? What are you patenting? The compiler/interpreter? The context-free grammar (assuming it has one)? The language specification? If the specification, then you really mean a copyright, not a patent, because a language specification is just a description of a language, and you can't patent that. But just because you've placed a copyright on your description doesn't mean you hold a copyright on anything that anybody creates after having read that description - that would be ludicrous! Sure, we can talk about the compiler/interpreter itself, but that doesn't prevent someone else from going ahead and creating a completely separate compiler that implements the same exact specification (look at the GNU Compiler Collection, more commonly known as gcc).
dminor 15y ago
What you want and what the law allows may be two different things. Ideas are not subject to copyright. Specific implementations might be.
orangecat 15y ago
The value of Mathematica is not that "Integrate[Sin[x^2], x]" is especially brilliant syntax.
- fluidcruft 15y ago
  Wolfram Research is infamous for claiming copyright to the language of Mathematica threatening to sue the University of California. They have also have a long history of causing automatic translators and shims for converting Mathematica syntax code into other systems to disappear (supposedly based on the language copyright).
  - nknight 15y ago
    Do you have any meaningful citation for these events? The only mention I can find of the incident you seem to be alluding to is a brief, vague, and un-sourced mention in a text file dating to 1991[1]. I'd be entirely unsurprised to learn that there is far more nuance to the story than what you and said file state, or that the incident was largely the result of a game of telephone. [1] http://progfree.org/Copyright/against-user-interface-copyright.txt http://progfree.org/Copyright/against-user-interface-copyrig...
joe_the_user 15y ago
It's not terribly complex. The answer to your question is no. If you ship a language with implementation and would like to prevent others from implementing it, you should not be able to and fortunately even under US law it seems you cannot. The motivation for a state-provided monopoly on "inventions" was to foster innovation (and we should be clear this institution is a state intervention in the market and has nothing to do with "natural rights" and such). The ability of patents to provide society with this benefit is debatable but fortunately there's clear consensus that patenting/copyrighting/owning ideas is bad. And a programming language is essentially an idea rather than an artifice and it certainly seems intuitively obvious that giving people ownership of language would get really nasty, really quickly.