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| Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, June 09 2012 @ 11:35 PM EDT |
First, I disagree that the total *VALUE* of software is decreasing, in the sense
that value is what is recieved for using it.
I think the correct statement is that the scarcity is decreasing, making it more
and more difficult to extract economic rents for it -- that is, with how many
thousand apps on your favorite phone, in a democratised publishing process, how
can any single title or author make a big pile of money at it? Especially with
the absolutely user-hostile experience of hunting/sorting through the Apple
store?
Now, back to the question of, say, a patent for this virus-proof OS. It will
(pie in the sky) cost perhaps a half million dollars to develop. *IF* it were a
piece of hardware, the patent office would offer me a temporary monopoly so
I(and my backers) had a better chance of making my money back, rather than
getting steamrollered by a company in either Redmond or Silicon Valley.
This is the bargain which patents are supposed to strike: Teach the invention,
so it is eventually available to everyone, and you get a temporary monopoly.
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I think everyone here agrees that the software patents we are looking at on
Groklaw are universally in bad taste, should never have been granted, and are
being abused to everyone's detriment.
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But I seriously wonder if there shouldn't be a place for more reasonable
software patents -- like the interface on Mitch Kapor's lotus 1-2-3, which had
all the properties of a real invention except that it didn't care much about
which hardware it ran on. Others have noted that "it was a copy of earlier
spreadsheets", and so it was...but the user interface was something else!
*************
I'm wrestling, slowly, with the question of how to bring this to some kind of
fruition. I'm really in the position of Student, of the Student's T
distribution, and starting to wonder if I should make the proposal a bit more
concrete before approaching some serious names in computing....because the idea
is one whose time is very near, if not upon us. Success need not be a
traditional software business...I'd prefer to license it on terms that are
discriminatory to firms with headquarters in Redmond...
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