Patent-enforcement madness often seems to have much in common with terrorism, but there is a bright side. It is helping more and more people think through the nature of competition, marketing, government privilege, what can and can’t be property, and other important considerations. It has been an educational opportunity for everyone, and here is a an excellent example: a beautifully argued and well-written post in The Register explaining that commerce isn’t built on ideas as such but on actual production and marketing. “Anyone can think up a brilliant idea. The difficulty is in doing something with it.”
Source link: http://blog.mises.org/13783/what-is-wrong-with-paul-allens-view-of-the-world/
What is Wrong with Paul Allen’s View of the World
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Anyone can copy someone’s brilliant doing-something. The difficulty is thinking it up.
Patents make it illegal for a second person to think up a similar idea and act on it. Do you agree that this is just or only in cases where is was copied?
Thinking is hard, but why should thinking be illegal just because someone else thought something similar?
I am against patents’ prohibiting acting on independent invention.
That’s often all patents end up doing!
I am under the impression that ONCE a patent is secured/published the components of how it was made are obtainable. Then, anyone can make SMALL changes or substitutions and go forward with the similar product. Ideally, a new invention does better if it is in “patent pending” status. At that level, no one can know what the engineering or design of the invention are. Please correct me if I am wrong. There are, of course, foreign countries who obtain something here, take it back to their country and duplicate it. They have no regard for U.S. patents or copyrights.
Hold on there Silas. That’s terrorist talk. Trying to compensate the innovator for his contribution to social benefit is akin to flying hijacked planes into buildings. You should know better by now, my friend.
I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to cause a 2nd 9/11
social benefit is but a felicitous by-product, the critical issue is the abolition of monopoly privilege and the socialization of its enforcement costs.
flying planes into buildings has different consequences to thinking about same.
But now they won’t let anybody else fly planes into buildings – Freaking terrorists have a monopoly.
hahaha, it’s probably illegal now because someone else though of it first
You know what might be cool? Reading the article.
I read it.
I agree with Silas. That article was weak and confused. If it was a horse I’d shoot it.
If someone is a consultant, they get paid for ideas. If they are a “self-employed consultant” (AKA inventor), why should they not be allowed to be compensated for their work via patenting and licensing?
You and the anti-patent crowd would force inventors to work exclusively for huge, multinational conglomerates with rapid production and marketing abilities, or quickly forfiet their ideas & designs to companies adept at counterfeiting.
Without patent protection the biggest & fastest companies win, while small to mid sized companies can forget about it.
Proper enforcement of patent laws will insure people are motivated to build better mousetraps as long as the protection for their labors continue to exist. Without them, innovation will be restricted to a few large multinationals.
Wow, you think people understand how the market works, and then…it turns out that they do not.
Look, socialism can be made to work in the realm of ideas (dreams) but it is in reality where it fails. So it is with all ideas: they must be tested by economic reality. That’s what competition is for: honing ideas ever more to comply with the demands of the real world. That’s why Rothbard insisted on speaking of the capitalist-entrepreneur, and not just the dreamer.
As for paid consultants, that is nothing to do with anything.
How sad that we even have to argue against patents here – with full knowledge that the entire Austro-liberal tradition has stood against them, and prophetically so.
Wait, is “socialism in ideas” the same thing as when ideas are treated as unowned, irrespective of who first found them? You seem to be using it in a different sense, which makes non-standard use of the term “socialism”.
Socialism is systematic violation of property rights. If you don’t accept ideas as property, it’s not socialism.
No one owns “the big bang” it’s a thought about something that may or may not have happened (try not to digress on this example too much). Because one person “though” of it, does that now mean no other person is permitted it “think” this same thought?
How about “thinking” of international trade. If I think of that first, should it now be illegal for everyone else on the planet to think similar, or derivative, thoughts?
Look what you’ve done! Now Dr. Krugman’s gonna sue you!
“`Socialism is systematic violation of property rights. ”
Like intellectual property rights? Looks like the analogy holds.
“Because one person “though” of it, does that now mean no other person is permitted it “think” this same thought?”
IP prohibits instantiating an idea on the market, not simply thinking of it.
Well, since for all this time, you have not defined what “instantiating an idea” or “on the market” is, I’m saying you’re wrong. Thinking about something is also instantiating it, and free exchange is also prosecuted. Another fail.
“Thinking about something is also instantiating it.” Amazing – I’ve just been watching the classic sci-fi movie “Forbidden Planet” . An ancient civilization, the Krell, produced an enormous energy source that that could control with their thoughts to materialize any object they wished. The Krell vanished the night after the machine was turned on – be careful what you wish for!
I can shovel shit in a forest but if no one cares, then I have no legitimate claim to getting paid for it…
apologies for the short argument but “work” does not mean that others “must” compensate me for it.
Try focusing on contracts. If you and I agree to something, then you an I can be bound by it (generally speaking). If I pay you to think of something, and then someone on another continent thinks of the same thing, why are they bound by our contract? You and I still are, but why are they?
Even if we concede, for the sake of argument, that ideas are property, how can someone have “stolen” your idea if they think if it independently? If they have never “heard” your idea, how could they have stolen it?
To your point about “biggest and fastest”, by this point in the evening I have had a pint or two but, really? Are you joking? Big companies are the fastest? Wow, sign me up for whoever employs you because that’s a holy rail that none of us in the real world have been able to find
If they have never “heard” your idea, how could they have stolen it?
i think it has been established that the idea cannot be like what many consider ‘physical property’.
even if they have heard of it.
kinsella and others use ip to denote the govt mechanism of scarcifying ideas in a way similar to the scarcity of what some consider physical property. he and others may also use ip to descibe the notion of owning or possesing an idea based on establishing a claim or info showing its development.
i cant see who responds here so when i see posts claiming ip i assume these people to be genuinly asking or beliieving that ip exists, which it cant.
it seems now that many or few lie here. thats sad.
i guess if ones against ip they are against the govt mechanism of attempting to scar-cify ideas and patterns….and a philosophical or descriptive claim of ideas being property.
and they may in a sense be against or wary of contracts to create ip-like structures when third party or non contracted parties who come by said ideas integrate them as they see fit.
un-scarci-fying the ideas or content and unleasing it on the market.
You are quite correct. Why should anyone be forced to work when they can live a life of leisure? Scarcity is just a myth, after all.
Scarcity is just a myth, after all.
no, if one week you have a billion gallons of water and 3 weeks later you have 150 million water is getting scarce. and you begin to look for more where before you werent looking for more.
its not a myth.
“”"You and the anti-patent crowd would force inventors to work exclusively for huge, multinational conglomerates with rapid production and marketing abilities, or quickly forfiet their ideas & designs to companies adept at counterfeiting.”"”I think you missed the point of everything that is being discussed and what reality has shown around you.The point is that here you have a large number of huge, multinational conglomerates with rapid production and marketing abilities that made huge amounts of money capitalizing on ideas without ever involving any of those ideas that make them money with the patent system.Meanwhile you have this guy that has dumped 100′s of millions of dollars doing nothing but research and development and investing heavily in patents, all of which ends up being a complete and utter flop in the marketplaceThen that guy goes and turns around and punishes the large corporations for their success by colluding with the USA government by suing everybody and their dog.The vast majority of patents that major corporations create never actually get used for any purpose at all. The most that most end up getting used for is for artificially inflating the assets of a corporation to make credit slightly cheaper. The amount of money, especially in the field of computers, that patents actually generate is dwarfed by the legal overhead that patents require.The idea of rewarding inventors and risk takers through the patent system is one that makes a lot of sense and is a attractive concept on the surface of it, but falls flat on it’s face when actually put into practice.
Oh, and especially in computers the only time I’ve actually seen patents put into use by people other then ‘patent trolls’ is the use of patents by larger and more established companies against smaller and younger companies and groups and to reduce overall competition in the market place.
Try competing as a small inventor with 1 or 2 patents against a big company like Microsoft or IBM that regularly cranks out 100s of patents per month.
Perhaps they should be more careful in the article though: Google’s business model could still be a thorn in the eye of IP opponents considering the licensing policy of Google Earth for instance… (to be “activated” ten years from now?)
http://www.google.com/permissions/geoguidelines.html
Artisan, I believe you are correct. I don’t a have many references but I believe they have multiple patents on their search and or ranking techniques.
The arguments put forward in the article are useful but Google probably isn’t the best qualified poster child for non-IP related success.
That being said, I know Google is incredibly permissive in other IP related arenas but have not yet taken the leap on the search end of things.
“Anyone can think up a brilliant idea. The difficulty is in doing something with it.”
I do not agree. There are many, many bad ideas. As one example, just look at what passes for knowledge in mainstream economics.
However, it is also true that making a good idea commercially viable requires technical, financial, and marketing expertise, and these factors are just as important as the idea itself.
Try this link
http://BrilliantIdeas.mises.org
Remember ideas are free!
“Try this link
http://BrilliantIdeas.mises.org
Remember ideas are free!”
Thanks for the link Walt! I love what Kinsella has done with his new website.
just look at what passes for knowledge in mainstream economics.
what is passing as knowledge??
After reading the article, I discovered that I should better familiarize myself with the intellectual property arguments of the Mises institute. For some time, I’ve vacillated on the IP issue, but the article helped to provide perspective.
Thanks, Jeff!
Jeffrey:
Here is my contribution to BrilliantIdeas.mises.org (Not sure that there is anything brilliant about it, but according to President Obama it could get you 3 more miles per gallon).
Description: A high pressure reservoir that attaches inside a tire rim. When the pressure in the tire falls below the recommended pressure, air is released from the reservoir to keep the tire at the recommended pressure. The high pressure reservoir can be checked and refilled during oil changes. If the reservoir runs low, a warning light can come on to indicate a serious loss of tire pressure.
I assume that in the US, ideas published on your site become part of the public domain and qualify as “prior art”. This is a great way to stop patent trolling.
Just one more example of the absurdity of patents I read today: Nestle has issued about 1700 patents on it’s Nespresso. So yeah, a damn coffee machine has more than a thousand patents only to have opportunities to sue competitors.
Or one can take a look at the computer industry, where patent trolls are always suing some big company that dared to apply some rather common idea that vaguely resembles a vague concept.
No doubt that patents can be used to absurdity, but I’m an empirical example, I have invented and patented a number products and then sold them through my company, employing hundreds. After having every single idea copied in China, resulting in the loss of many domestic jobs in my company and the loss of millions in sales, I just stopped inventing products. I now compete on service and limit my business to items difficult to import. Since I gave up on inventing, very few new ideas have emerged in my niche. It’s all just cheap copies of things invented 20 years ago, all competition is on price now. It’s a soulless dead end. with crappy quality and no innovation. The patented items were never copied by the Chinese until the patents expired. Patents work, not 100%, and they are abused, but they do serve a purpose for some of us who only have ideas and hard work to offer, and need more than 80 cents an hour to live.
If people “choose” to enter into service agreements with you instead of “choosing” to enter into restrictive intellectual property related contracts, how can you be certain that they really want your “ideas”?
Sounds like they love your service, they’re paying you for it. They’re not paying you for government backed patents. They’re paying to for service.
I work in intellectual services as well. I am bound by confidentiality agreements but I refuse to partake in activities leading to patents. No one cares about that, they only want me for my service. They want to know what they should do in any given situation. You can’t patent advice like that and everyone seems to love advice like that.
In my industry people talk about “innovation” all of the time but in reality only the patent holders care about that term. Paying customers care about getting the job done in the best possible manner. Patents merely make it illegal for other people to think of something you already thought of. Really, if I’m capable of thinking of a unique idea, anyone can do it. Why do I have a right to restrict them from connecting the same dots I did?
If your problem is “theft” or “contract violation” that’s a different discussion. That falls under the heading of what to do when someone breaches a contract you have made with them. People in China thinking of thoughts you have had remains in the realm of government mandated patents and monopolies. People in China breaching a contract you have with them rests in the realm of contract law. Try to separate the two, it makes for a much more intriguing discussion.
North didn’t seem to me to answer bagoh20′s point: “After having every single idea copied in China, resulting in the loss of many domestic jobs in my company and the loss of millions in sales, I just stopped inventing products.”
Are you saying this is right? Are you saying, this is unjust, but hey! Tough shit!
North specified this was not breach of contract (“The patented items were never copied by the Chinese until the patents expired”).
IP or patent (sorry, I’m not clear on the difference) does not make it illegal for someone to have the same thought: this is a straw man. Surely, it is an attempt to prevent theft; not the theft of the idea but of the rewards that rightfully belong to the original inventor and producer.
I’m trying hard to understand the anti-IP position, but so far, I don’t get it.
Hi Marc, thanks for the reply. I had a few drinks last night so it’s more than likely that I was not making my position very clear.
What you point out as a straw man is, in fact, not a straw man. Patent law in its present form says that whether you copy or think of the idea independently, you are not permitted to to use it, even for personal use, if someone had patented it first. This is the law, even if you independently thought of it.
And the argument about losing domestic jobs to foreigners being bad, this is mercantilist argument. It may be worth knowing of but applying it to IP instead of trade does not make ‘saving jobs’ any more moral. I don’t think you’re saying that it is right to use government forces to mandate that all jobs remain within the US. And I would assume that you are not in favour of restrictions in importing sugar so that we can keep sugar farming in the country. But if you make the argument for domestic job in IP or Patent law then why stop there? Why not restrict all international trade to keep jobs domestically? Losing jobs overseas is not justification for any use of force. Bringing that into a patent discussion is no different than brining it into any other trade discussion (it’s not a legitimate argument now because it’s applied to patents).
At the end of the day, the jobs are not lost as the poster says they went to China. It’s not bad that jobs go to China. It means that consumers can purchase goods and services at a lower rate.
A side note about sending jobs to China. Years ago someone thought of sending jobs to China. This is a good idea and made them money. I would call the job innovative. Why would they not be permitted to patent this idea? Wouldn’t it motivate them to think of more ways to trade with other countries and revolutionize this industry? No, it would simply give them a government monopoly that would obviously hurt trade and innovation in trade. The problems are obvious when we talk about trade but I know many people see it differently when talking about, for example, software programming. But software can do things analogous to trade. You can write programs to “send” and “receive” things and even “return” with something altogether new and different. Why is is just to have a monopoly in “thought” when talking about software but you cannot do the same for trade?
Further, the example above that prompted these responses is not empirical, it’s anecdotal. anecdotal data are useful but you must be cautions about the kind of conclusions you draw from them. The conclusions about jobs being lost because this person stopped “thinking” in favour of “servicing” (how that is different I have no clue, except, perhaps, one is patentable and the other is not?) is not supported by the data.
Why I try to focus on contracts, I do it for a reason. Instead of having the government bind everyone in the country to agreeing to whatever restrictive terms a patent holder puts forward, try creating a contract where you promise to let people use your idea for a fee but demand in the contract that they cannot share the idea with anyone in any way shape of form. See how many sales you get taking that approach. No one will want to work with you because contracts like that are excessively restrictive, why would they pay you to be restricted to that extent? Why not just hire someone for their services instead of being bound by contracts to benefit one party only.
If this person truly has genius ideas, then maybe someone will pay for them and agree to an incredibly restrictive contract. But that’s between them. Just because a thought occurred does not mean it is now morally unjust, and therefore not permissible, for someone else to have this same though. If you call this a strawman then you must agree with me that making it illegal for two people to have the same thought is wrong and not something you want to argue in favour of. If you do agree with that point then you also agree that patent laws, in their present form at least, are also unjust. Maybe you don’t advocate absolute abolition, but you do agree that some revisions are necessary. That makes a great and productive starting point for a discussion.
Only the government stepping in can create a situation where “idea thinker up’ers” get paid to screw their customers over. In a services industry, where patents are less numerous than say manufacturing, “idea thinker up’ers” tend to help their clients instead of intentionally screwing them over.
That’s why governments have to mandate patents. Because it’s such a crappy deal for everyone other than the patent holder that no one would do business with them if similar terms were required voluntarily of every single customer.
I’m neither pro-IP nor anti-IP: I’m still trying to understand the solid arguments for both positions.
“What you point out as a straw man is, in fact, not a straw man. Patent law in its present form says that whether you copy or think of the idea independently, you are not permitted to use it, even for personal use, if someone had patented it first. This is the law, even if you independently thought of it.”
Point taken, although I’d still say that “it’s illegal to think the same thought” is not the same as “you are not permitted to make practical use of it” (i.e. create a product). To say “it makes thought illegal” is an extreme and slightly misleading statement, which, I suggest, will not win allies (it put me off, for a start).
I still don’t see how the case described bybagoh20 (anecdotal tho it is, it is surely useful as an example), is different from theft. Let’s say I buy some land and cultivate it and after 3-4 years I have a fruitful farm. I leave it for a week to go on a well-earned vacation, and return to find it taken over by squatters: they sell the fruit etc and keep all the profits, but they did none of the homesteading work. I realize my example is not an accurate analogy (if a product is copied, the owner’s original one is not stolen), but I still can’t shake the impression that the profits are stolen: those who benefit did not think up the original idea, nor put in the hard work to develop it. Surely if such behaviour encounters no penalties, the incentive for inventors/entrepreneurs must drop: who would spend time and money inventing something if they know the (pick your favourite copycatting culture) will steal the idea and deprive them of their earnings?
And if I own the only bakery in town and then someone comes in and sets up a bakery then surely the profits are stolen. Surely if such behaviour encounters no penalties, the incentive for investors/entrepeneurs must drop: who would spend time and money constructing a bakery if they know others will set up shop close to them and deprive them of their earnings?
My main point was that I stopped creating new products. Not only me, most other companies in our niche did the same. They stopped innovating and everyone just went to China to find manufacturers to compete on price. The innovation in our industry stopped. Those of us who were inventing new products, could not get the rewards of it, since either our own foreign supplier or someone else’s would quickly copy it, killing any chance of recovering the cost of development. My point is that all the innovation died, mine and my competitors. The Chinese don’t bother to innovate either – for the same reason, they will get ripped off too. It’s not about rights for me, it’s about progress or the lack thereof.
@North said: “If I pay you to think of something, and then someone on another continent thinks of the same thing, why are they bound by our contract’?” I would add “bound by our laws” and also ask why the purchaser should be prohibited from buying that product.This is the type of issue that tipped me over the edge to anti-IP.To answer this question in a pro-IP fashion presupposes the validity of artificially created geographic borders in which a monopoly of force exists. Even if one accepts this as a valid construct with respect to ideas, the end result is that the patent monopoly is enforced against the consumers of the resulting product. While one may use the ideas of “fairness” and “property rights” to differentiate the patent holder from the “patent violator”, this is irrelevant. The patent is ultimately enforced against the purchasers who are within that geographically monopolized area and must be judged on that basis.
Thats a good point!
I had a hard time letting go of any pro-IP sentiments myself. In discussions I could refute some arguments but Stephan Kinsella put forward some arguments that I could not refute. I like how he went all the way back to defining property .
Quick fix to territorial limits on IP: One-World-Government.
I would add “bound by our laws” and also ask why the purchaser should be prohibited from buying that product.This is the type of issue that tipped me over the edge to anti-IP……
anti govt mechanism to ‘protect’ developers??
@james
Not sure what your question/point is.
Here is what I was trying to convey. Country A has patent laws and a patent is issued to citizen A for a widget.
In Country B, someone named B produces widgets. How can Country A’s laws apply to B?
If B’s widgets are sold in Country B, then applying A’s laws seems absurd.
If B’s widgets are sold in Country A, then one may say that the patent for widgets granted to A applies to B’s widgets being sold within Country A.
My point is : The pro-IP argument is that the patent is being enforced against the widget producer B. In reality, the patent is actually being enforced against the citizens of Country A who may otherwise prefer to purchase B’s widgets.
I never said anything about “protecting developers”, whoever or whatever they may be. I suggest that we protect PRODUCER B’s right to build and sell widgets from the mercantile monopoly privilege granted to A for the dubious distinction of saying “tag, you’re it” first.
The US Government has a split personality when it comes to monopolies. Patent Law explicitly creates monopolies; anti-trust legislation takes them away.
A long time ago, IBM was the leader in mainframe computers – this was before PC’s came on the market. Only large corporations could afford mainframe computers. However, IBM used to make most of its money renting out hard drives and printers. (In those days, a disk drive that would hold less than a USB thumb drive was about the size of a refrigerator). Other manufacturers made printers and disk drives. However, the IBM operating system would not write to these peripherals. IBM was sued under anti-trust. They agreed to make it possible to use non-IBM drives and printers. However, there was a catch – you had to buy an interface unit. Needless to say, the interface unit was as large, and cost as much to rent as the peripheral being replaced! Furthermore, if you had any system problem, the IBM technician would not come to do any service until a service technician from the competing company certified that there was no problem with the non-IBM peripherals. One of the reasons large companies bought IBM in the first place was for tech support- if a multi-national corporation in Zambia had a problem, IBM would have a technician on site within 24 hours. Other companies could not provide this level of service.
I can remember the original Lotus-123 spreadsheet. The 5 1/2 disk had bad sectors on it to make it hard to copy. When someone issued a program to break this, they introduced an adapter that plugged into the serial drive. If the adapter was there the program would not run.
The moral is that even with no IP, people will spend time and money to devise ways to stop people making copies and will not give their work away for free. Or, if this can not be done, people such as bagoh20 will simply not do the work in the first place – he can not run a business where he can not make a profit – he is forced to choose to do something else that can.
A similar thing happened to AT&T.
It was able to use it’s patents to squash competition up until the point when the competition figured out work around and started to compete…. then the government took over the regulation of the industry in a heavy way (if I remember correctly) and deemed AT&T’s monopolies as necessary to fight the Russians and kept AT&T monopolized and protected up until they decided to split them up.
Ironically the original inventors of the telephone is heavily disputed and there were at least a few parallel inventors working on similar items. That is without patents the telephone was going to be developed anyways.
And double ironically the monopoly status that the government granted AT&T had many stipulations and restrictions. One of these major restrictions was that AT&T would be limited into entering the computer technology market. AT&T would still carry out research and development for it’s own purposes, but could not create products based on it.
So this is how the Unix operating system was created. Unix was created originally to take advantage of a limited computer with a crappy OS and it’s name was a joke at Multics, which was a huge academic operating system project doomed to failure from the start due to it’s ivory tower origins. Once the Unix developers invented the portable C language and rewrote their OS in it then it was useful for far more then just running some games on a limited PDP-7.
AT&T could not sell Unix-based machines, but it could release it for research purposes.
Thats were Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) of the University of California, Berkeley picked up the Unix source code and wrote their own improved Unix version called ‘BSD’.
That lead to one of the most influential pieces of software ever written: The TCP/IP Protocol stack. As part of a Darpa project they needed a fault tolerant communication protocol to run over networks that needed to be able to survive a active military campaign, possibly even nuclear with whole sections of the network being erased off the face of the earth. TCP/IP was designed to meet such requirements.
TCP/IP is the core technology that made the internet possible. On a digital network of the size and scope of something that needs to cover the entire planet (and nearby outer space) failures are going to be constant. You need TCP/IP in order to deal with the constant failures and inefficiencies inherent in all man-made systems.
And TCP/IP was released with no copyright restrictions. Anybody can use BSD code for any purpose. Which they did.
Unix vendors, using AT&T code, all of a sudden had a OS that was a networking powerhouse. While all other companies developed huge and expensive OSes that spoke high-efficient proprietary network protocols that were relatively fragile…. only Unix had the ability to speak with a large number of different vendor systems over a large number of different networking technologies… all due to BSD code, freely created and distributed. And thus Unix became the dominate OS for a while.
Then the Unix major vendors started to be able to license Unix copyrighted code directly from AT&T.
And you know what they did?
They used the copyright to sue the creators of the BSD operating system. They did this to prevent them from creating a freely distributed OS that could be competitive with theirs. This effectively killed BSD and they had to rewrite most the OS from scratch to avoid copyright infringement.
Meanwhile the Unix vendors created more and more proprietary, closed, and ‘IP Protected’ innovations and fought to use their IP and proprietary features as a competitive force to:
1. Convince customers to purchase the OS and their hardware
2. Lock the customers into the OS and hardware since applications using those features would not run on other Unix OSes.
This made Unix, which was once freely distributed and open source, so completely expensive and fragmented that only the largest companies could afford to use it and Unix no longer catered to the needs of innovative small and medium businesses, hobbyists, mass market software producers, and researchers.
This left the field open for two new operating systems, ultimately:
1. Microsoft Windows
2. Linux
Microsoft Windows, which got their start making Unix systems, switched over to completely different OS base that was something they controlled entirely. It took decades for them to make NT into something worthwhile, but they pulled it off eventually and kept it cheap that everybody and their mom could use it for themselves and their businesses. Microsoft is now the poster boy of the huge profits you can create through exploiting government controls to create artificial scarcity. They still used BSD code for some aspects of TCP/IP in early versions of their OS (which was probably mostly gone by Windows 2000 era). To this day Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and all the server variations are NT OSes.
Linux, a Unix clone. They use a much more militant form of open source licensing the then very liberal BSD licensing. They use the GPL license which turns copyright around on itself… effectively forcing you to keep Linux open source and freely distributable if you distribute it yourself. The term they use is ‘copyleft’.
Together these are now the dominate OSes avialable in the world today.
Windows owns the consumer desktop and corporate ‘knowledge worker’ and generates billions and billions of dollars for Microsoft.
Linux now is 2nd popular OS on the server, increasingly forms the back bones of our financial institutions on Wallstreet, dominates high performance computing clusters (~90% of the top 500 most powerful computers in the world are running Linux), is the basis of all useful forms of ‘Cloud computing’ (and yes I can give you a real answer on what cloud computing is), and is now the dominate OS of course in small consumer media devices. Such as things as the Android phones.
Android is now the new big thing for open source OSes. It use Linux at it’s core, but it is a non-Unix OS based on modern programming concepts. It has a mixture of GPL and BSD licensed code (mostly BSD) and is rapidly out competing all proprietary OSes. Displacing iPhone and Blackberry as the most popular OSes on smart phones, selling to the tune of over 200,000 smart phones per day…..
…. Which is now being sued by Oracle for patent infringement and copyright infringement. (the copyright infringement is horsecrap, but they have a strong case for patents)
A company that does not have anything to do with phones, but creates databases and software used by HR and finance departments the world over and happens to have purchased Java, which is was open sourced by Sun Microsystems, which Android uses some parts of under a clear and open open source copyright license… but not a patent license.
The whole history of computer science is now littered with cases of people innovating and working hard to build up companies and be hugely innovative DESPITE the best efforts of copyright holders and patent owners to limit. Almost all major innovations in computer science happened prior to to patents for software being possible. Since then it has degenerated into a downward spiral were lawyers are more useful to you to generate profits then inventors.
This latest Paul Allen thing is just the nail in the coffin that proves it. That despite millions of dollars he poured into research to gain patents they completely and totally utterly misread the market and failed to anticipate ANY of the marketable products and innovation that has gone into turning computers and the internet into just about the most important technological advancement in human history. Easily rivaling the gun powder, the printing press, and the invention of advanced mathematics.
He completely missed it and is now turning around and suing the corporations that made all of this possible!
That is to say, they work to create artificial scarcity so as to raise the market value of things they sell.
Or as in ink jet cartridges that contain an eye dropper full of ink, keep changing the design and make it difficult to refill with ink, and make the “used” cartridges difficult to refurbish.
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