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The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

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On Patents | 756 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
On Patents
Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, July 21 2012 @ 05:50 PM EDT
> The life of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, civil engineer
> 9 April 1806 – 15 September 1859

So what is it about the human propensity to
(never?) learn from mistakes?

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Brunel was the Bill Gates of his era
Authored by: tiger99 on Sunday, July 22 2012 @ 06:04 AM EDT
Which makes his view on patents not entirely surprising. Remember what Gates admitted in 1991?

As an aside, note how SWPAT draws heavily from Groklaw for reference material (at the bottom of the page), so the solid evidence we post here about patents being bad goes to places where it can be used to best advantage, all because of concepts like sharing and Creative Commons, and even simple web concepts like hyperlinking. See why sharing, and the freedom to do so, and a reasonably free internet, are so good?

Now why do I say that he was the Bill Gates of his era?

  • Lack of compliance with established standards, which had to be subsequently reworked. Railway gauge, network protocols.
  • Technical incompetence. Most of Brunel's bridges had to be rebuilt. Bill's input into Windoze speaks for itself.
  • Greatly revered by the non-technical masses.
Having said that, I must admit that Bill, whose publicly reported utterances and even court depositions are generally not entirely truthful, did get it about right in 1991, as did Brunel. And, Bill got patent-trolled badly by Jobs. Slashdot which I quote reluctantly as the other link I had is not working right now.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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