When we get something working first, there are probably some optimal partial solutions there. Working around the patent means having to do some things inefficiently while being able to provide better efficiency or cost of the overall system.
In my work, I all too often see that the obvious optimal solution we come up with turns out to be patented and we are spending time on finding least bad worse solution. (unless our patent lawywers manage to pussh through a patent for the same thing with different wording, like measuring period instead of measuring frequency)
In some cases it is not possible. For example, 3D printing was held back for 20 years just because of sleeping patents.
https://www.wright-brothers.org/History_Wing/Wright_Story/Sh...
"We wish it to be understood, however, that our invention is not limited to this particular construction, since any construction whereby the angular relations of the lateral margins of the aeroplanes may be varied in opposite directions with respect to the normal planes of said aeroplanes comes within the scope of our invention."
Some people (Curtis) felt this claim was far too encompassing and should not be enforced. But I don't know, These guys just spent a decade working out an entirely new discipline, aeronautical control. And you don't think they deserve exclusive exploitation rights to that discipline for the next 20 years?
And a million people had the idea of "controlling a vehicle in the air". Patents aren't for vague ideas, they're for specific mechanisms.
It isn't their pov. 90% of computing patents are basically 'X on a computer'
Eg the Amazon 1 click buy patent
Somehow 1 click buy doesn't quite feel like it's in the same category as humanity conquering the skies.
The socially practical effect of working patent law is that it incentivizes inventors to publicly document their inventions by offering limited exclusive rights to the invention. To that end, an overly broad claim to hypothetical inventions which are not actually documented in the patent is detrimental and instead stifles innovation.
20 years is the midpoint between the Wright Brother’s flight and operational jet fighters. They won the race but it was very much a competition. If Orville and Wilbur didn’t cross the line first then Maxim or Langley would have. They all built on George Cayley’s work.
So no, I don’t think the first one to file a plausible patent should get exclusive rights. It should at least extend to contemporaries. And we should consider the cost to innovation when breakthroughs are artificially constrained for what amounts to multiple technological generations.
Hard to say they were ahead when they were in an evolutionary dead end.
Unfortunately in my own ruminating on the topic the only practical alternatives seem to be one or more variations on the scary boogey man of socialism.
The Wrights definitely were in it for the money.
The government project was the Langley Prototype, which cost 20 times more than what the Wrights spent, and fell into the Potomac like a sack of wet cement.
> the scary boogey man of socialism
For good reason. Socialism's track record is pretty bad. They're always running out of other peoples' money.
However the track record for developed countries communally sharing "intellectual property" is much much better. Universities, open source, and public domain all have some crossover with the ideals of socialism.
Yes, communism has repeatedly failed spectacularly.
The softer socialism of public welfare has worked (so far) for many countries including the US. Although I'm skeptical about the future given modern demographics and our governments' choices to appease a majority. The governments of most developed countries smell socialist to me. I'm from New Zealand and most private income/property is taxed up the wahoo to pay for our social welfare programs: it doesn't take much squinting to see my own society as broadly socialist.
Somehow I see people in the US complaining that the Chinese are beating the US at capitalism (regular complaints of price undercutting and monopolistic behaviours) - what's weird since the Chinese are supposed to be pinkos.
I'm not joking - the D language is as open source as possible. We give it away for free.
When you force people to pitch, share, cooperate, etc, things start to don't work out so well and you start getting people that takes advantage of a system that mandates others to work for a cause no matter what, as well as people that will do whatever they can to not do their work.
Free markets are a component of capitalism just as they are a component of market socialism. China is a planned economy which stands in contrast to a market economy. But China has taken bits and pieces from many systems to create something that works for them, a hybrid that's probably specific to China alone. It's just capitalist enough to be able to interface with big wallets around the world, but we can all agree China itself is very far from being free market capitalism.
For a while the most used editor for Unixen wasn't vi or a vi descendant (vim), but Emacs, an editor alien to Unix. Knowing Vi was almost something 'mandatory' in order to manage servers' configuration under any Unix like OS, and ed on hard emergencies where even the terminal wasn't reliable enough.
Windows needs WSL2 and POSIX compat to be relevant today. Win32 itself doesn't run on top of a DOS like VM having almost a 95% of control of the machine, but on a VMS'like kernel with objects a la IBM.
MacOS itself it's just a Macintosh like UI made from NeXTStep scraps, a Mach kernel and pieces from a FreeBSD useland.
Define socialism. Isn't the collectively owned road outside your property essentially socialism? Would that work better if it were privately owned?
I say boogeyman not to imply it is without problems but rather to say that in the problem spaces that it is often deplored the incumbent alternative is often categorically worse for all those who do not directly benefit from it, which is usually a supermajority at a minimum. Thus, to make the incumbent more tolerable a caricature of an idea is brought forth to scare those who would otherwise support an aspirational idealist into backing the known “lesser” evils.
There aren't many pure socialist countries like there aren't many (any?) pure capitalist countries. Most of Europe operates in mixed mode, half socialist. Some countries are very bad (and against) at implementing any measures that directly benefit the lower classes (as opposed to the typical capitalist "trickle-down economics") so they vilify anything that has even the faintest smell of socialism.
> They're always running out of other peoples' money.
I wish people would stop parroting this as some sort of deep insight. Capitalists don't run out of other people's money but they do collect all of it. Ask the capitalists who sink other people's investments with no recourse. Ask the capitalists who get funded from people's pension funds, with "interesting" IPO strategies. Don't turn a blind eye for the sake of a remark which was witty a few decades ago and sounds just ignorant today.
This seems like a success story in spite of software patents, not because of them. Just because they were forced to develop a new protocol in order to avoid getting sued for using Cisco's doesn't mean that they wouldn't still have improved on what Cisco had if they'd been allowed to use and modify it freely. The lack of lawsuits hanging over everyone's head certainly hasn't prevented innovation from happening in FOSS.
I don't agree that that's the biggest problem. I think the biggest problem is that patents are abused to stifle competition by refusing licenses or putting untenable fees on them. No one would have cared about Nintendo's D-pad patent if they'd just put a reasonable license fee on it. On the other hand, a patent like MP3 I would argue is quite legitimate, but putting a patent on a coded just makes interoperability more difficult. If MPEG had charged licenses for decoding chips and explicitly allowed software implementations, that would have things so much more smoother.
Whether it's single passenger cars or AI, nobody really understands how inefficient they and their lives are.
Governments mucking around with things like patents only distorts markets in ways that make them inefficient, and ultimately worse. Anyone who thinks the government's intervention improves things hasn't been at the business end of the government.
Patents (and copyright) aren't bad. It when it becomes too broad. Not reflective of the effort involved, or too long lasting when it becomes an issue.
Fwiw, early steam engines were also patented, and that slowed down development until the patents expired.
* from 100 years ago, one that would happen anyway because tech progresses, patents or not
* one that that wasn't correct one as they didn't patent VRRP (which was another open source competition to it), they tried to patent troll it
and both of them were "proper use", not "we will try to make our patent as wide as possible so we can stifle any competition"...
I think the claim of being entirely useless, at least in most spaces is very valid. There are some techs that take years and millions (medical drugs come into mind), but vast majority of patents are just stifling technical progress, and especially on software side
RSA can if you equal factors to 0.