Proprietary software is from dark ages

Right on! But we are not out of the dark ages yet, perhaps in a few billion years we may just be emerging. If anything we have regressed. Look at the make up of business, as manufacturing has become a legacy business, people are making a scramble to proprietarise any and everything, so they can earn the lion share of assets without doing a stroke for it – manufacturing is fast becoming a game for mugs and the queues for services are probably worse than they were a few hundred years ago. You can’t speak to anyone easily as you have to wait while you listen to music, only to be answered by someone who knows nothing and is paid relatively little.

Why should you, as an employer, continue to profit from the work I perform as your employee?

Because that’s what the employee gets paid for. There’s little or no point for companies to exist when whatever is written by their employees isn’t owned by them, it’d be like paying them for setting up little companies for themselves.

Pieter,

I don’t agree with it. The companies can still exist by shifting their core focus from selling the product to offering service. There are many other ways in which a company can monetize. I will never agree that the concept of company will become meaningless without the IP hold. If your argument is to hold true, there shouldn’t be any company existing on top of open source software.

It is the “intellectual property” thing. Vendors do not know how to deal with the effect of this.

If an engineer designs a car and leaves the company, car design is a still company’s property. That doesn’t seem strange to everyone.

But when software is built the same way, everyone asks “why”.

Until these issues are resolved, vendors will fear open source for potential “intellectual property” violations, no matter how bad this concept is.

That’s just how business works today.

But we will make it better with open software.

I wish that we should stop calling nonfree software “propietary software”.

It is a battle we have conceeded them. It puts it in a good light with respect to free software, instead of properly identifiying it as a menace and threat to society.

The opposite of “free” is “enslaved”.

Yes, we should definetly use the correct term for enslaved software. The correct term is neither nonfree nor propietary. Nonfree just carries the “lack of freedom” meaning but also the “with a nonzero cost” meaning, while propietary carries the positive meaning of “that software is mine and mine only”.

But the moment that you use the word enlaved, you bring to mind images of cruel and rich slave owners with the whip on their hands marking the backs of defenceless slave girls just because they can’t carry the heavy loads that they are told to.

Using that term is better than explaining “free as in freedom, not price” all the time. With such an image in your mind, it will naturally be carried over to the correct meaning of the word “free”, with no explanation necessary.

Engineers are contractually bound to forfeit any idea construed whilst on the company’s payroll. It seems reasonable because the engineer designing a car would have absolutely no means to create the car without the enormous budget and facilities provided by their employers.

“I give you money and tools, you give me your creations, deal?” – “Deal”.

It isn’t true that an employee-employer model can’t exist that suggests the engineer deserves at least some credit for the design. Consider the relationship employees had 50 years ago with their companies – an idea almost archaic in nature to the free form, flexible, constantly evolving market – company loyalty. Employees have no need to devote their time and effort to a single entity because it isn’t necessarily worth the investment. Employers, on the other hand, don’t see a need to colonize their employees with patent rights for the same reasons.

The open source movement can’t exist in the current state of the market; it would require the complete upheaval of how we currently employ. If companies and engineers alike could somehow realize that their customers would benefit much more with a join effort, I think the open source movement will have a chance at survival.

Alex,

But when software is built the same way, everyone asks “why”.

It is because people see car as a product and software is considered as a knowledge system.

What if all the people who have laid the foundations for todays technology had claimed intellectual property rights…Galilao,Kepler,Newton,Einstein Etc Etc…we would still be in the dark ages. Hugh

Exactly Hugh. It is my point. My favorite quote in this regard is that if people like Newton and Galeleo had adopted these patenting nonsense from day one, we will still be running around naked exchanging potatoes for meat.

What would happen is the governments of that time period (Galileo’s and Newtons, that is) would simply have taken them by force, “for national security reasons. What’s wrong with you, are you not loyal to the State?” Government officials have historically done and abused whatever they think will increase their own personal power. And thus, those governments would’ve kept such “subversive” ideas like gravity and the calculus hidden away. So yes, we (of European descent, that is–not the Incas, Aztecs, or Chinese) would still be in the Dark Ages, and now you know why.

The topic in question is not whether there should be govt. control or not. It is an altogether different issue. The issue of govt. doesn’t come in this discussion. It is about companies monopolizing markets through tools used in dark ages.

I think the real issue, once you boil it down, is whether or not MS has the right to patent “addition”. It’s one thing to copyright entire works or suites of software, but quite another to say “I own the for loop”. If I’m not mistaken, one of their patents was dealing with regular expressions – their grounds for dealing with Eudora’s infringement. It doesn’t stop at trivial dark age inventions, but extends to whether or not someone has the right to “own” mathematical expressions and algorithms – something that patent law strictly forbids. I understand wanting to invent something and maintain some form of ownership so you can make a living – I’m not entirely against all forms of IP – but what I don’t get is when people think they have the right to prevent others from using math just like them to solve problems. The patentable parts of software should be the tools and languages themselves, not the algorithms we use within them. I know – that sounds backwards, but so is software.

Very true.