(no subject)

Лекция Столлмана

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Q:
No it is not the programmers themselves sir, they are companies who have invested in something ?
A:
And you what the company get sued because in your large program there are five different things that somebody, that five different people already patented. Now its clear to see the myth that you are operating on, its the naive idea that when you develop the program you will have the patent. Well, the idea, that very statement contains a mistake because there is no such thing as 'will patent' when you develop a program with many different things in it, there are many things each of which might be patented by somebody else already, and you find out about them one by one when they come to you saying either "pay us a lot of money or else shut down" and when you duel with five of them you never know when number six is going to come along. It's much safer to be in the software field if you know you are not going to get sued as long as you wrote the program yourself.

That's the way was before software patents - if you wrote the program yourself there is nothing to sue you about. Today you can write the program yourself, it may even be an useful and innovative program but because you didn't reinvent the whole field, you use some ideas that were already known, other people sue you. Of course, those people who wanna go around suing you, they are going to pretend that this extortion is protection for them, protection from what, protection from having competitors, I guess, they don't believe in competition, they want monopolies.

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Q:
Most people, if they had a chance to get a patent and make a lot of money out of it, they wouldn't pass it up ...
A:
Well, many people if they had a chance to get a gun and make a lot of money of it wouldn't pass it up.