IP: Re: Software Engineering, Dijkstra, and Hippocrates: ]

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

> Date: Sun, 27 May 2001 00:23:45 -0700
> From: John David Galt <jdg () diogenes sacramento ca us>
> Organization: Diogenes the Cynic Hot-Tubbing Society
>
> Brad Cox writes:
>
> > > > > In it, he states "I would therefore like to posit that computing's 
> central
> > > > > challenge 'How not to make a mess of it,' has *not* been met."
>
> > > [It's] worse even than that. We haven't even started down the road that
> > > mechanical or civil engineers followed to achieve their vaunted
> > > maturity. We don't even seem to think that this road is even
> > > applicable to software engineering. I'm referring to Open Source and
> > > the angst on this list whenever someone proposes to take intellectual
> > > property rights seriously.
> > >
> > > Imagine a Honda engineer proposing to mine his own ore and refine his
> > > own steel, or a civil engineer proposing a new home-brewed kind of
> > > concrete. But building from first principles is routine for "software
> > > engineers". Why? Being made of bits and not atoms, software can be
> > > copied so easily it undercuts the market economics that underlie the
> > > maturity of other domains.
>
> Building from first principles, or as I like to call it, reinventing the
> wheel, isn't something software engineers want to do.  We're FORCED to do
> it PRECISELY BECAUSE our current intellectual-property laws don't allow
> us to take and reuse the tried-and-true techniques of our forebears.
>
> Powerful special interests have extended the term of copyright to lengths
> that are ridiculous for software.  Almost all software written 20 years
> ago is obsolete and disused, but it'll be protected by copyright for 70
> more years, if it isn't extended again!  On top of that, software
> publishers make dubious claims of licensing and trade secrets (which they
> now want the law to recognize via UCITA) to prevent such reuse even after
> their copyrights expire.  And worst of all, they now have DMCA which makes
> most reverse engineering tools (decompilers and the like) illegal!
>
> The world wouldn't stop turning if these rights were cut back to 20 or 30
> years.  Microsoft and its competitors wouldn't even go out of business.
> But debugged, improved, and unbloated knockoffs of their older products
> would start to appear on store shelves, and I think we'd all be better off.
>
> Copyright and other forms of intellectual property were not created in
> order to benefit publishing companies.  They were created to get more
> innovative works into the hands of the public, and I feel they would serve
> that goal better if they were cut way back.
>
> And until this reform occurs, if it ever does, the open-source movement
> (preferably without the anti-commercial bias of the GPL) is the only good
> source of "raw materials" available to those of us outside the companies
> sitting on those hoards of old code.
>
> John David Galt
> Software Engineer



For archives see: http://www.interesting-people.org/