[geeks] Re: [SunRescue] djbdns, BIND, and DNS Security

[Joshua D. Boyd]

On Tue, 29 May 2001, Greg A. Woods wrote:

> Developers suffering under most USA jurisdictions are likely to be more
> troubled by patent laws than copyright laws though, and the trouble with
> them is that you might independently invent something that would still
> put you in violation of a patent!  Even worse it seems that unlike
> copyright law there are damages that can be collected from such
> violations other than just profits made from the violation (i.e. you can
> lose even if you gave away your code for free!).

Patents are usually possible to work around if you know about them.  That
is, assuming that they aren't damn stupid business model patents (I
believe that Amazons 1-click patent is usually categorized as a business
model rather than techinical innovation).  For instance, GE has a patent
on Marching cubes, but it isn't hard to come up with other ways to skin
implicitly defined surfaces.  Perhaps you'll come up with something
outright better while you are working on it (for instance, I believe that
Marching Cubes only covers polygonal representations.  So, imagine
inventing a why to go from an implicit surface to sub division surface).

At least, that's my understanding of the way things work.  What I'm
interested in though, usually the patents aren't enforced much, or they
are about to expire in a few years.  Unlike many people though, I don't
think that patents should be totally gotten rid of.  For instance, I think
that drug patents are fine (I mean, the patent is only for 17 years, and
the first 10 are usually spent getting FDA approval and other testing).

I suppose that software patents could be OK, if they were so brain dead
most of the time.  I'd be hard pressed to say that RSA didn't deserve a
patent for instance, but 1-click?  Come on, gimme a break.
 
> Personally all I can say is that as a freeware developer I would have
> long ago been forced to leaved left the USA if I'd orignally been born
> (or lived as a resident) there.  Sorry my southern neighbours, but your
> crazy laws are just not compatible with my needs!  As it is I consider
> myself very very lucky to be a Canadian and I hope my efforts and those
> of my countrymen will continue to bring into power Canadian governments
> which will be able to resist at least the worst parts of any oppression
> from our giant neighbour to the south and indeed also any from our
> increasing powerful cousins in the EC.  Corporate oppression as mandated
> by national governments and inter-national agreements is a very scary thing.

I think that every country has major problems.  As a programmer, many
countries look appealing because of the saner intellectual property laws,
but then I look at other things and see stuff I'd hate even more.  For
instance, I don't think that socialized medicine is a good idea.  In
general, most countries in general (including the US to a slower extent)
seem to be moving towards socialism (or in cases like Germany, they might
be moving away, but they don't want to move far away), and I think that
non voluntary (meaing that I should be able to opt out easily) socialism
is just wrong.  It assumes too much about how good people are, and I think
that people aren't good enough, nor are they likely to ever be.

If anyone wants to reply to that last paragraph, send the reply to geeks.
In fact I'm cross posting to encourage that transistion.
 
> > As to distributing patches, yeah, I think anyone can.  They are a pain
> > though (because multiple patches might conflict, thus giving birth to
> > projects like MegaPov and Lame, which were both large patch sets against
> > software that wasn't friendly to being forked).
> 
> NetBSD was once a "patch set" for 386bsd.  :-)

So was Apache. A Patchy Web Server was the original name
 
--
Joshua Boyd