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LifestreamOh, nice work CNET. Can’t quite figure out if “honchos” is meant in an affectionate way though.
Behlendorf said the way to rebut the argument that software patents provide an incentive for innovation and research investment is to imagine the world without them.
“If you could not patent software algorithms or ideas, how much of the money spent on writing software would go away? How much innovation would disappear? How much investment in that innovation would disappear? I don’t think any would disappear,” Behlendorf said.
True, true. With few exceptions there is little money in actual programming. If you succeed at something, against the odds, then maybe someone will buy your software. But that is not the same as saying that people are encouraged to invent in the current system. If “inventors” had any common sense they would go for tennis instead .. or organized crime .. errr .. politics. So, Behlendorf is correct in his logic.
Again this clashes harshly with the so called, protestant work ethic that builds the core values of the American system and that has started to infect other systems as well I must assume. What is otherwise intrinsically and narrow-mindedly known as on side of the “American dream”. The illogical assumption here is that people are aware that they can be “rich and famous” if they succeed and thus that is their incentive and also prerogative. Both locked in an ideologically illogical ouroboros / mobius strip as it were. The core of the problem is that we have a wealthy elite that want even more for themselves and we have the common misconception, being perpetrated in part by the same elite and their kind, that people are clairvoyant to success or whatever you should call it.
Truth and events are retrofitted as it were, to fit the picture. It’s like if you happen to cut yourself while shaving or the alarm clock breaks down and you end up missing your train and then the train derails. And you come to the conclusion that all of this was “meant” to happen. “If I would have done this or that then .. “. You end up actually taking time to wonder if there is something more to life in terms of a higher meaning. Blah. Causality doesn’t work like in sci-fi.
The point I’m trying to make here is that we have a long way to go. Not just fighting the industry but national ideologies, i.e. the basis for social structures … not to mention human mental heuristic ineptitude and primitive cognitive abilities.
