On 15 Jul 2002, Gilad Ben-Yossef wrote:
> So you think going to a to a leagal argument which someone spend hours > on planning and designing, > and then someone comes after all this effort and say cool argument/idea > lets copy it and put it as a precedentm and ofcourse it takes him a lot > less time cause the planing and designing is already done. i think y'all are getting to radical in your views. let me give you a counter example, comming from the medical field. as you know, the process of designing, testing and manufacturing a new kind of medicine, tends to cost between 10s of millions of dollars and hundreads of millions (i'm not talking about the very extreme cases of research into deseases for which no cure was yet found). because of the large investment, laws were formed to give monoply rights to companies for selling a given medicine for some period of time. there are also provisions to break this monopoly prematurely, by a competitor proving their medicine is better then the original. if you'd take away this kind of law, you'll have to find an alternative means for making drugs. would these means be governmental? this goes counter to the current notion that you sohuld take business out of the government's hands, and into private hands. how would you do that? btw, with the law issue you raised, they came to the model that its not the lawyer who pays so much - its the client. and in the case of a poor clients - its the state (assigning a state attorney to the client) - but the state only pays for defending clients - not for clients who want to sue other bodies/people. now, when you go to software, ely's concern have a point, and y'all bashing right at him will not make these problems go away. some things in the commercial software have given quite a lot of progress, which denying will do no good. i do think some kind of protection should be given - and i think that the argument is mostly on the balance. and isnce there is no protection on ideas, and since only ideas which are hard to implement properly have commercial value in the sense of selling software, we should come up with a way to still handle those ideas which are simple to implement. free software gives some solution to that. but it will work properly _if_ people can still make money on selling software, because many people who write free software, do it in the hope to learn more, and in the hope that this learning will eventually allow them to earn a living. and the fact is that some of you are still implementing commercial software (i do to) - and getting payed for that - which is a justification to the time spent earlier by y'all on free software. -- guy "For world domination - press 1, or dial 0, and please hold, for the creator." -- nob o. dy ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
