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It is not exactly the same transformation as you said. Information and matter are for practical purposes fundamentally different. You can't just copy a device a
by igorhvr 17y ago
It is not exactly the same transformation as you said. Information and matter are for practical purposes fundamentally different. You can't just copy a device a million times over with near-zero cost, and you also can't change mechanical devices with the same facility that you can change bits.
Patents for software do not save time and money, nor do they make things run more efficiently, nor do they improve life for countless individuals. This is simply not the case.
Also, patents are not made in specific lines of code - patents would be a smaller problems if they did. They do patent abstract ideas.
To put simply, the main difference is that (besides the fact that most software patents are bogus) since software is pretty much a set of ideas and nothing else (as opposed to hardware where you have a few ideas and a lot of work worrying with beauty, physical constraints, durability, etc) a good team of programmers will have a few hundred good ideas in the course of writing any non-trivial piece of software - which means that patents can kill free software (since it is unlikely that people working for free would want to license software patents), and also make commercial software projects impossible (even if you have the money, having to license patents from 100 different companies would surely be discouraging - specially for a small company).
- fnid 17y agoPatents for software do not save time and money, nor do they make things run more efficiently, nor do they improve life for countless individuals. This is simply not the case. I didn't say patents do that, I said software does that. I do not believe software is "just a set of ideas." If that was the case, why do we need engineers to take an "idea" for a software system to implement that system? Building an idea with software takes time, experimentation, trial and error. Mistakes are made. Algorithms are optimized. Do you really believe that software vendors don't worry about beauty and durability of their software product the same way manufacturers of physical products do? In a lot of cases, we have "designed obsolescence" of mechanical products, so I can't avoid disagreeing with your statement there. The whole point of patents is to share the knowledge learned in the process of going from an idea to an invention that implements the idea. The problem with sharing the knowledge is that it becomes more difficult to capitalize on all the effort that went into building the invention. You let others know of the invention and how it was built so they can use that knowledge to further improve the world, while also protecting their ability to feed themselves while they work on more ideas to improve the world. I know many believe software should be free, but the ability to kill free software is one of the benefits of patents. If a company or an individual makes some software worth patenting and then someone decides to give away that same software for free, then the patent holder should be able to kill that free software. I don't believe that free is somehow more moral than not free. I don't see anything immoral about selling software. In fact, the motives of many who give away free software could be argued less moral than those who sell it. Why is there an association between people who sell software and "bad" software vendors? A lot of proprietary software vendors are good people who want to create companies and employ more software developers to write more code and make the world a better place. I don't believe not showing all of your cards, or code as the case may be, makes you a bad person or a bad company.