in message <MPG.207b459234e99b38989716@n...>, Grant Robertson
('bogus@b...') wrote:

> In article <9fs7e4-et3.ln1@g...>,
> simon@j... says...
>
>> People think Tim Berners Lee was foolish for 'giving away' the Web. But
>> all the inventors of the Web's predecessors are now marginal or out of
>> business all together, whereas Sir Tim has his knighthood, a great deal
>> of respect and influence in the community, and a very nice salary, thank
>> you.
> 
> Exactly. I keep telling my friends that Linus Torvolds hasn't made a
> penny from licensing Linux, but he always has a job. Now, whether Linux
> is patented or not, I don't know. So it may be a bad analogy.

Of course it's not. How could it be? It started out as the apolitical son
of communists in a socialist country deliberately reverse engineering an
existing system - UN*X. It's now significantly different from UN*X in some
interesting ways, and some people claim to have patents on many parts of
it (see for example the ongoing IBM/SCO/Novell litigation). None of these
can or will stop Linux.

>> > Thanks for the info. Something tells me that there wouldn't be such a
>> > brouhaha over who owns patents to XML if W3C had crafted a well
>> > designed patent when they first invented XML years ago.
>> 
>> But no-one would be using XML if they had. XML is only a prolix syntax
>> for S-Expressions, and S-Expressions, though very flexible, are not the
>> only flexible expression of data. If XML were encumbered with patents,
>> we'd all be using something different.
> 
> I don't agree with that logic but that is just my opinion. Crayola
> patented their crayons but you can still draw lots of pretty pictures
> with them. 

And you can buy other crayons from other people. A crayon is not a
standard. A standard is something used by a community of independent and
in many cases competing and even hostile bodies in order to allow them to
interact; consequently, a standard does not work unless it has effective
monopoly. Many standards - even many variations on the same standard
(RS232) - are equivalent to no standard.

> If the patents are licensed for free, with no restrictions on 
> how the technology can be used, then there is nothing stopping anyone
> from building new patents based on the technology, or just making up new
> inventions or standards based on the other patent and never patenting
> that new part. Just as there is nothing stopping anyone from extending an
> unpatented, prior-art and patenting the extension or improvement. Almost
> no patents are on entirely new things with no prior art. The patent only
> covers what is new and different. If the owner of the new patent wants to
> do anything with their new technology then they must have rights to use
> the prior art. This is achieved either through licensing existing patents
> or simply using the unpatented, prior-art for free.
> 
> If I patent my standard, I will be able to license it for free. But I
> will also be able to place restrictions on that license. I can say it is
> free only so long as you don't attempt to "embrace and extend" the
> standard for proprietary purposes. This is the best of both worlds.

I think you are deluding yourself. In most of the world, software patents
are illegal anyway (as they should be). In the US, where they're not
illegal, as you yourself say the people likely to 'embrace and extend' a
successful standard are Microsoft. Do you think you could afford a battle
with Microsoft in the US courts? How many billion dollars could you
personally afford to pay your lawyers?

-- 
simon@j... (Simon Brooke) http://www.jasmine.org.uk/~simon/
"This young man has not the faintest idea how socialists think and does
 not begin to understand the mentality of the party he has been elected
 to lead. He is quite simply a liberal" 
                                -- Ken Coates MEP (Lab) of Tony Blair