IP: Re: Software Engineering, Dijkstra, and Hippocrates: ]

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

>Date: Sun, 27 May 2001 00:23:45 -0700
>From: John David Galt <jdg@diogenes.sacramento.ca.us>
>Organization: Diogenes the Cynic Hot-Tubbing Society
>
>Brad Cox writes:
>
> >>>> In it, he states "I would therefore like to posit that computing's 
> central
> >>>> challenge 'How not to make a mess of it,' has *not* been met."
>
> >> [It's] worse even than that. We haven't even started down the road that
> >> mechanical or civil engineers followed to achieve their vaunted
> >> maturity. We don't even seem to think that this road is even
> >> applicable to software engineering. I'm referring to Open Source and
> >> the angst on this list whenever someone proposes to take intellectual
> >> property rights seriously.
> >>
> >> Imagine a Honda engineer proposing to mine his own ore and refine his
> >> own steel, or a civil engineer proposing a new home-brewed kind of
> >> concrete. But building from first principles is routine for "software
> >> engineers". Why? Being made of bits and not atoms, software can be
> >> copied so easily it undercuts the market economics that underlie the
> >> maturity of other domains.
>
>Building from first principles, or as I like to call it, reinventing the
>wheel, isn't something software engineers want to do.  We're FORCED to do
>it PRECISELY BECAUSE our current intellectual-property laws don't allow
>us to take and reuse the tried-and-true techniques of our forebears.
>
>Powerful special interests have extended the term of copyright to lengths
>that are ridiculous for software.  Almost all software written 20 years
>ago is obsolete and disused, but it'll be protected by copyright for 70
>more years, if it isn't extended again!  On top of that, software
>publishers make dubious claims of licensing and trade secrets (which they
>now want the law to recognize via UCITA) to prevent such reuse even after
>their copyrights expire.  And worst of all, they now have DMCA which makes
>most reverse engineering tools (decompilers and the like) illegal!
>
>The world wouldn't stop turning if these rights were cut back to 20 or 30
>years.  Microsoft and its competitors wouldn't even go out of business.
>But debugged, improved, and unbloated knockoffs of their older products
>would start to appear on store shelves, and I think we'd all be better off.
>
>Copyright and other forms of intellectual property were not created in
>order to benefit publishing companies.  They were created to get more
>innovative works into the hands of the public, and I feel they would serve
>that goal better if they were cut way back.
>
>And until this reform occurs, if it ever does, the open-source movement
>(preferably without the anti-commercial bias of the GPL) is the only good
>source of "raw materials" available to those of us outside the companies
>sitting on those hoards of old code.
>
>John David Galt
>Software Engineer



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