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| Authored by: Tkilgore on Monday, September 03 2012 @ 01:20 AM EDT |
Your ending comment indicates that the discussion is completed. It is true that
there is not much more to discuss; most everything has been covered, and we do
not entirely agree. Nevertheless, there are a couple more points.
What you quote Edison as having said, I remember reading, too. Edison was a
self-made man with very little formal education. Therefore, his approach to
problem solving was to try everything conceivable which might work and some
things that might not, throw it all at the wall and see what sticks. This
clearly is one of the things he meant by the "perspiration" remark. To
the extent that received wisdom or knowledge may have been wrong, and sometimes
it *was* wrong, he was absolutely right. But he was not always right. For
example, since Edison was not educated and not a scientist, he was simply unable
to judge objectively the knowledge and abilities of Tesla. As to the light bulb,
though, Edison did succeed in producing a *commercially viable* light bulb,
which was his goal.
In your next paragraph, you discuss the costs and difficulties of doing research
in genetics. And you also mention software development, which you think is
comparable though you say that you are not a programmer. I am a programmer part
of the time, and I do not do genetics research. What I am is a mathematics
professor in a major university, who has also written software for the Linux
kernel and for a couple of other Free Software projects, somewhat as an adjunct
of my professorial job. That is, I do not program for a living, but it is in a
way part of my job. I have done a respectable quantity of research in
mathematics as well as having written code.
As to the question of genetics research, therefore, I tend to view it as an
academic endeavor which is part of the job of a professor. Professors are
supposed to do research whether paid extra for it or not. It is part of our job
description. Of course, in my field much less equipment and facilities are
needed than what is needed for biochemistry or microbiology.
Now, one of the hot topics recently is the use of the "intellectual
property" generated by academic research to make university education
"pay for itself." This idea has caught on, even in Congress. There is
the Bayh-Dole Act which among other things permits a university to sell the
"intellectual property" generated by financial support from federal
grants. In other words, the taxpayers pay the university to do the research. The
university can then turn around an sell the results, naturally after patenting
as much of the "product" as possible. This seems very clever to some
people, but if one stops to think about it, it is a policy which short-circuits
the role of a university, especially a public university funded through taxes.
To keep matters totally in perspective, the university exists in the first place
to serve the people of the state in which it is situated, and the state provides
funds to perform that role. Thus, to overturn the university's historic role as
an institution of public service and to convert the university into a
profit-making generator of income for "self-support" by selling off
its "intellectual property" amounts to nothing but an act of
prostitution. Perhaps quite lucrative in the short run, but very destructive in
the long run not only to the practitioner but also to society at large. As to
genetics research in particular, much has been done in the past on which present
knowledge builds. That mass of research was produced by people who were doing it
for self-satisfaction or for traditional goals of academic advancement.
Professors in a university are *supposed* to do research, and in fact they do,
in a system which has worked well for several centuries without professors being
asked to participate in get-rich-quick schemes. There is no actual reason to
change that system now, either. Moreover, much of the recent progress in the
field has been facilitated by using computers, which are in fact not very
expensive. And as far as where the rest of the money would have to come from, if
any is needed, then I would suggest that, sorry, someone just has to think up a
better way. Funding methods which will obviously end up corrupting the very
institutions which provide us with social continuity and which train our next
generation, are obviously not good methods to adopt. Sorry again, but if there
is no other way then to me this way is clearly not worth the price.
Now, turning to software, I would say that, no, the two fields of software and
applied genetics are not comparable, at all. Therefore, whatever one might say
about the application of patents to one of these fields might not apply at all
to the other. Specifically as to computer programming, you do admit that you are
not a programmer. In that case you ought to listen to those who are. As far as I
know, the set of those who actually have done programming and who believe that
software patents are a good idea is a measure zero set. That is a subset of the
whole set which is so small as to be statistically equivalent to an empty set.
This observation definitely includes those software developers and programmers
who work for companies. As one example to confirm this, I point out that
testimony in the recent Oracle v. Google case demonstrated that the engineers
who worked for Sun thought that the patent system had gone off the rails, and
they had started a contest about filing for the most off-the-wall, dumb, and
crazy patents that anyone could hatch up -- and getting said patents approved.
They thought it was all a joke, and they were doing this to defend their own
sanity in a world gone mad. This came out in testimony in the trial, as I said,
in the trial where Oracle was actually attempting to put some of those patents
to use by sticking it to Google. So if you don't want to believe me because I
said already that I support FOSS and have written software myself, then please
take those people seriously, who were writing software for a living.
The second thing about software patents which I would point out is that they
have illegitimate origins, in the eyes of many. Why do we have them? Is it
because of statutory requirements? No, it isn't. If anything the words written
in the statutes about patents would seem to exclude categorically the entire
field of programming. So, we have software patents only because we have the
CAFC, a court which exists almost solely to judge appeals about patents and
therefore loves them to death, which decided a case a few years ago which seemed
to allow such patents under some circumstances, and then followed with a
succession of decisions after that which broadened those circumstances
repeatedly. The whole situation, then, has been brought about not by any act of
congress and definitely not after consultation with the most affected
profession. Indeed, the situation got to the point years ago that people can
hardly write a single line of software code without a real possibility of
violating several patents -- without even knowing what those patents are. Why
does nobody know what is in those patents? Because even those who work for a
living writing software are instructed by their superiors never to look at
patents. Why? Because if they looked at the patent and decided it has nothing to
do with what they are doing, or they think it is so crazy that it can't be taken
seriously, and then later on it can be proven that they looked, the violation
becomes "willful" which triples the potential damages to the company
if it gets sued and loses. So people in the software industry ignore patents
systematically, for their own self-protection, and moreover are so instructed by
their employers.
The upshot of what I have described above is that we have a completely crazy,
upside-down patent system as far as software is concerned. And, as I said, it
seems that very few people who actually write software have any responsibility
in causing the situation. They have only suffered at the hands of others,
richer, more powerful, and more politically connected, who go around claiming
that they know what is good for the people who will be affected.
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Wol on Monday, September 03 2012 @ 12:34 PM EDT |
Then you haven't been following these sort of threads closely.
As I've pointed out, Edison had *previously* visited Joseph Swann's lightbulb
factory!
Cheers,
Wol[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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