Date: Sat, 13 May 2000 16:21:00 -0700 From: W Gerald Hicks <jhix@mindspring.com> To: chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Why are people against GNU? WAS Re: 5.0 already? Message-ID: <391DE35C.BA359426@mindspring.com> References: <391D71FE.1570F551@asme.org> <Pine.BSF.4.10.10005130735370.20100-100000@hydrant.intranova.net> <391D4DAD.FD80980A@picusnet.com> <003b01bfbcdc$6059fb40$a164aad0@kickme> <391D71FE.1570F551@asme.org> <20000513205610.A22103@physics.iisc.ernet.in> <3.0.6.32.20000513143506.00895650@mail85.pair.com> <20000514010614.A16058@happy.checkpoint.com> <391DDB3E.8DFFD8D0@mindspring.com> <20000514041848.K22405@physics.iisc.ernet.in>
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Rahul Siddharthan wrote: > > > > > In the present (US) economy intellectual property can be readily > > converted to material property. > > Irrelevant. You can get material property from the sea (eg by > fishing) but that doesn't mean you should own the sea. It's relevant in trying to explain the topic. Also, it's a bit of a stretch to say a holder of one bit of intellectual property would believe that they "own the sea" of proprietary works. > It's even more > irrelevant than that: by fishing you decrease the number of fish in > the sea, but by borrowing ideas you don't decrease the number of ideas > in the world. Any scientist knows that new ideas can develop only by > building on old ideas. If you stop sharing of "intellectual > property", you'll kill growth of ideas, and that's not in the public > interest -- though it may make a few people very rich in the short > term. When the present (US) economy reaches a stage when Amazon can > charge royalties for its single-click patent, you know that something > is wrong somewhere. Indeed, the US Patent Office has been doing more damage to the concept of valid IP protection than perhaps any other force. That doesn't mean that the whole concept of protection for intellectual property is invalid. The ideology in the United States assumes that capital investment is required to produce intellectual property. In many cases this is very true, especially when one considers the "soft-silicon" IP market where major investments are required to produce and verify designs. Elimination of profit incentive in these markets could have a major detrimental effect on the investments required to produce the innovations we have been enjoying. What is often not considered is that the labor and intellectual effort that goes into producing software is a form of "capital". Eliminating profit incentive in software development will have a direct impact on the growth of new ideas as mindshare moves to fields that are more sustainable for those individuals. > > early stages of the GNU project and maybe even because he agrees with > > many of the tenets of communism. > > Why don't you ask him that one. Thanks for being condescending. -- Jerry Hicks jhix@mindspring.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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