[extropy-chat] In defense of slashdotters (was transhumanism == militant fascism)

[Rik van Riel]

On Tue, 5 Jul 2005, Jacob wrote:

> I concurred based on the idea that slashdotters typically are a diverse
> crowd, not necessarily based on the licenses that are supported on
> there.  I confess to be somewhat new to extropy and this list.  I am
> curious as to what opinions are present on here on the issue of
> licensing/patents/IP etc... 

The issues of licensing and patents really need to be
treated as separate, because they are.

On the licensing front, I believe that it is best for
software to be made available under the license that
stimulates innovation the most, for this piece of
software.

Sometimes a proprietary license is best, because the
development can really only be done by a small team of
dedicated professionals (who need to be paid) and the
software is for a niche market.

Sometimes the software is widely used infrastructure,
and the best license is one where everybody can
contribute, without fear of anybody else doing an
"embrace and extend" on the software.  This means a
license like the GPL, since that guarantees that you
can contribute code, without your competitor creating
a proprietary fork of the project.  We have seen cases
where a company publically states they are willing to
open up their code for inclusion in a GPL project, but
not a BSD licensed project.

Sometimes the software is meant to become widely used,
for example the ogg vorbis code.  Since the creators
would like ogg audio playback to be available in
proprietary software and devices too, the BSD license
works best for this scenario.


As for patents and software - I have seen no evidence
that patents stimulate invention in software (not even
pro-patent research found any!), but I have seen lots
of evidence that software patents stifle innovation.

Because of that I am against software patents.


Note that patents and licensing could be entirely
different in other industries.  Eg. in medicine there
are years of research going into a new drug, and a
patent helps protect that effort.  

This is a sharp contrast with software, where a patent
can be filed on any brilliant idea you came up with 
while eating lunch or standing in the shower. No research
required.


-- 
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan