Source code is just literature. Freedom of speech implies freedom to author source code.

Problems only emerge when source meets machine…

Very interesting article.

I disagree that patents are of any importance to Ireland though. What’s important is a healthy global economy, with mobile multi-nationals able to easily relocate to our cheaper (though, not any more) and tax-efficient shores. Whether or not patents have an influence on that is only an input into “healthy companies able to locate here”.

Indeed, if patents were a net negative economically, then possibly without patents we should have *more* economic activity, more companies able to locate here.

So IMHO the question of patents is irrelevant to Ireland. Except other than perhaps the short-term politics of corporates being locked into a strange “patents good, cause without them we’d be open to patent litigation, and wouldn’t have patents as leverage in such litigation and other business negotiations” recursive-think, and hence our politicians having too to be pro-patents, to keep our guests happy.

I too am unsure of what should be done about patents. However, I’m pretty sure the question must be examined solely from the aggregate economic POV. The most obvious economic guiding principle here possibly is “Monopolies should not be granted lightly”, further refined (perhaps) to “The extent of a monopoly should be weighted by the consideration made in granting it”.

E.g. one solution, as you suggest, might be to significantly raise the bar on quality of examination. Make it far more difficult to obtain a patents. This however, I think, runs into other economic facts-of-life: Cost of examination. So I think this idea can’t fly, the politicians will get an earful from business sectors about application fees and how “The Elbonians have much cheaper patents – we’re not competitive!”.

That leaves, IMHO, the only workable option, from an economic POV, being to significantly dilute the reach and presumed strength of a patent grant. If it is not feasible to filter out the crap, then the only workable system must have “It’s mostly crap” as a core premise. E.g:

- lower the terms of grants
- remove the presumption of validity on initial grants which makes most patent systems heavily biased towards grant holders, when a patent is contested. (Australia has this I think).

I.e. let the quality and validity of a patent be decided only /if/ it is ever contested. This would allow PTOs to focus their scarce resources on the (few) patents that anyone ever ends up caring about, and to decide, without bias, who to award it to (or not at all).

It would also greatly mitigate patent trolling – no longer would the trolls portfolio of patents carry the threat of huge damages..

Other things to consider:

- Does one size fit all?

Do the parameters which suit the pharmaceutical industry make sense for software? It can take a decade or more to get some new medicine to market, but a decade is forever in software.

Perhaps we ought to tailor the system for different fields of invention.

It definitely all needs reform, the problem right now though is convincing the patent-addicted of the need..

We’ll see :).

Here’s one example. As the developer of SpamAssassin, open source made sense for me because I could never compete with the big companies any other way. If I had been considering it terms of me (the seller) and a single customer (the buyer), economically I could make a case of “proprietary SpamAssassin” being a viable situation — but that’s not the real situation; in reality there was me, the buyer, a few 800lb gorillas who could stomp all over me, and quite a few other people who were happy to help out on “open source SpamAssassin” for free. So open sourcing my code had better results for me than not doing so (I’m quite sure of this).

Since then, I’ve basically had a career in SpamAssassin. in other words my open source product allowed me to make income that I wouldn’t have any other way.

It’s certainly not simple economics, is a risk, and is complicated, and many people don’t believe it — but it’s viable as an economic strategy for developers, in my experience.

Colm: I’d like to respond to your article, but I’ve run out of time now ;)

Quick point though — Ireland *is* a world class software development center. It may not feel like it for someone working here — but because software development as an industry is so concentrated in Silicon Valley, that’s basically the only competition. If you exclude the Valley, the rest of the world has an even *lower* concentration of talent on average than Ireland, in my experience!

Part of this is because the Valley is a talent sink — talented people worldwide flock to it, from their own areas.

‘Perhaps the likes of Havoc are notable exceptions to this.’

Yeah, no question about that ;) On top of that, there are many smart people in Ireland, although not enough of them have got their heads around open source as a value proposition for developers yet.

Finally — you need to consider more about how software patenting allows commercial publishers to evade open-source licensing terms if they have patents and so desire. it’s a nightmare for OSS producers like the ASF.

I think the drug companies are not deserving of protection under patent laws. They are in the business of developing chemicals to cure imaginary diseases, for the most part, just preying on the fears of the public (especially in the US – the sickest, most overmedicated population in the world).

It might help a lot if corporations (which are really NOT live entities) were not allowed to hold patents. Then the primary beneficiary of your ingenuity would be you, and the idea would be portable. If you wanted to move to a new company, your idea could move with you. Far too many inventors sold their idea to corporations who could monetize it, or worse, as is very common in academia, any patents achieved with school equipment belong to the institution. It is no accident that many of the older institutions feel very monastic. Your fellowship stipend ought to be plenty for all your work.

I guess I still don’t understand how Open Source makes sense for the developers, economically. I understand how it makes sense for adapters like me, who take an app like Xoops or Gecko and customize it gently for a contract. Saves me hundreds of hours of labour. The down side of this is that the whole software industry is seeing a good deal of undercutting aimed at sales to small and medium sized commercial institutions.

It is not unethical to charge less because you have a better process and can honestly produce your deliverable in a shorter time, but:
If you are producing that cost reduction by making your developers salaried employees and requiring 20 hours of unpaid overtime from all of them, then quality may start to suffer as burnout takes your experienced workers and cheaper workers appear (to be burned out in their turn).

Or if you have Superman and Wonder Woman on staff, and they both never sleep and are obsessive about their work, it works great until they retire (which they will do eventually. Yes, enjoy the statistical fluke, but you cannot support a whole industry on the output of one or two super-geniuses, and hope that more will appear when you need them. This is also a morale-bursting situation, as all of the developers are forced to become support staff for the stars.

Or if you have government support, as in the US where a major military supplier is not allowed to fail. The Chrysler shoring-up a few years ago is an example. Or you have price supports like artificial market supports for milk and wool. Inefficient processes are protected.

Back to open-source as a viable economic policy. I can certainly see where the practice in coding complicated and large projects is helpful to the development community, and makes the members more salable to people who will pay them, but isn’t this the same trap of expertise that we always fall into? We must run as fast as possible just to keep up, and except for the real stars, we are always at the mercy of employers who get all of this expertise at a marvelous discount and then run us all as hard as possible, for as long as possible. Are we not enrolling in the very practice that outsourcing the paying gigs to places with lower pay rates has done to our industry? Are we not participating in our own demise?