Copying

Friday May 27, 2005 - 2:38PM EDT

There are many arguements in the computer world about who came up with what first and who is ripping off who. The problem with most of these arguements is that the people having them usually don't have the in depth knowledge of computer history to make a legitimate claims. Lost in the mainstream computer world are the countless ideas that never saw public exhibition but that the insiders were always aware of. There are so many ideas out there, new and old that people aren't aware of until some big company comes along and puts it on display. Or it just happens to blow up for whatever reasons. Although it may seem contrary to the fact somtimes the fact is that the computer world is all about sharing. There is a saying that goes something like: A good programmer writes his own code, a great programmer uses someone elses. If someone else already did it there is no need to do it again (in a lost of cases). What happens then is that most if not all programs written are evolved from previous applications. Either throuhg use of the actual code or the ideas contained within the app. So it is difficult to accuse a program of ripping off another since that is the nature of programming. There are definately clear cut cases where a program blatantly steals source code and call it its own (CherryOS) but there are more cases where ideas presented by a program are copied or improved upon by another. This is one of the reasons software patents don't make any sense. Because patents were made for ideas translated into tangible objects. Tangible objects that had inner workings that are fairly complex and hard to duplicate. If you could make something do the same thing but in a different way then your wouldn't infringe on the patent. However patenting software doesn't make a whole lot of sense in my opinion. Because software isn't exactly tangible, even when considering it in the form of a file. It is still always an idea. Copyrights protect the source code but patenting the logic in your source code is ludicrous. The amount of complexity in software logic can be immense, which an infinite number of ways to do things. So identifying software patent infrigement is a gross judgment call. It always baffled me that large software companies hold so many software patents. Maybe it would make sense when it came to hardware programming but that stuff is more tangible than higher level software programming. Someone could look at Windows and duplicates it functionality exactly without every infriging on a patent. So I don't know what patents do. What does come to mind is the LZW compression patent (.gif files). Basically it is a patent of a mathematically technique an algorithm. That is fucking senseless. If people patented mathematical techniques our math books would have nothing in them. Algorithms should never be patented. Whoever came up with the idea of patenting software must have been one conceited mofo. They are ignoring all the "free" knowldge they aqcuired to make the fucking algorithm and saying, "even though the knowledge it took to make this was free, I am going to charge people for it anyway". It is a strange disconnect that I think had something to do with the rise of the consumption of non-tangible things. People want to apply the same standards they do to tangible objects to non-tangible ones and it is fucking things up. Wait a minute, I already went over this. The rise of the computer age and digital copies being different from traditional physical copies. Damn I am repeating myself, that is no good.