Don Lancaster, long-time hardware hacking columnist,
has NEVER seen an *individual* make money on a patent.
Possession of patents is not reflective of innovation,
it's reflective of money. Any move by the open source world
to support Daddy Warbucks' financial interests is welfare
for the high and pompous. They get plenty of welfare already.
Sanyo gets 240 million from Austin, while Austin simultaneously
criminalizes homelessness, Chrysler gets bailed out
by the Fed, etc. etc. Let the big guys take care of the big guys,
since they do less than nothing for the little guy.
Linux is about talent, excellence, and the primacy of the
individual. So is GNU. IBM is not. Nor is the patent office,
I'm sorry to say.
Stallman's "We talk about community..."
and Manifestos and trying to teach well-read grown men how to
talk and so on is rooted in a genuine concern for the freedoms
of the individual, which are seriously threatened when IBM
etc. blithely decide to "clean up" the GPL.
It could be argued that any use of a computer, any software,
is "obvious" in the parlance of the Patent Office, given said
computer.
Doesn't the leader in over-the-top business aggression, Microsoft,
have a patent on using XOR to toggle a cursor?
I suggest a policy, that patents are for hardware. The Patent Office
would thank us. If you want a patent on your nifty array indexer,
put it on a PLD. In which case maybe you can do better without
disclosure anyway.
Rick Hohensee
Visit http://cqi.com/~humbubba and see some of the things I
can't afford to patent.
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