Ben Sizer wrote: > Paul Boddie wrote: > > Ben Sizer wrote: > > > > > > Imagine if you were the single-person developer of a small application > > > that did something quite innovative, and charged a small fee for your > > > product. Now imagine you were practically forced to make your algorithm > > > obvious - a couple of months later, Microsoft bring out a freeware > > > version and destroy your business in an instant. Sure, they and others > > > can (and have) done that with closed-source products, but you increase > > > your chances of survival 10-fold if the key algorithms are not obvious. > > > > This point is fairly comprehensively answered in the following article: > > > > http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/08/apple_eats_whiners.html > > I don't believe so.
Well, it talks about competing against some large business who will eventually emulate your work. The advantage of small businesses competing against anyone with a fairly rigid schedule and an arguably non-agile internal organisation is that there will be a certain amount of time before that large business firstly gets round to dismantling your product (as opposed to that of the other small competitors), secondly manages to produce something which does more or less the same thing, and thirdly is able to bring it to market with the same level of quality/branding that its customers expect. Successful software businesses are not merely founded on the process of having ideas and implementing them - they might also need to be effective at delivering those ideas and going through the whole process again and again. Writing a neat utility for Windows is not by itself the foundation of a successful business - other factors are critical, whether they be continuous improvements, service, support, or a number of other things. > That talks about copying of ideas, which is quite > distinct from copying of implementations. The distinction may be > meaningless in your typical desktop app where implementation is usually > obvious from the interface. However in more high-tech systems such as > multimedia or AI, the same is far from true. Well, let's say that algorithms are a step up from mere ideas, and let's also say that actual code is a step up from mere descriptions of algorithms (since actual code serves to verify the behaviour of those algorithms). The article I mention states that people shouldn't expect to be rewarded forever for dreaming up some idea, and I extend that point by stating that people shouldn't expect to be rewarded forever for describing an algorithm - both of these things being patentable in various permissive patent regimes, which (in conjunction with a few other factors) really is quite harmful for anyone actually doing work in any of the affected lines of work. So, if we decide to ignore people waving pieces of paper around which make some claim to an idea or some way of solving some problem, instead investigating the actual code, others have pointed out already that if you provide just a binary and there exist people who want to know what you've done, those people will find it out whether you make it easy for them or not. Now, if we sidestep the issue of decompiling binaries and cast the affected work as some kind of service, the question can now be expressed as whether you should expect to be rewarded forever for providing such a service. This brings in a number of issues that are suddenly more apparent than in the case where the end-user has some binary - notably the issue of control over the activity that the service performs - and such issues could possibly increase competitive pressure rather than enhance any supposed competitive advantage if people felt that the market wasn't providing enough in the way of choice in that area. > > I read an article where various aging popular musicians were > > lobbying the British government to extend the period of copyright > > beyond 50 years because their first works would soon fall into the > > public domain and that they'd no longer earn royalties on those works. > > But in what percentage of the many other jobs that exist do you still > > get paid for a day at work that happened over 50 years ago? > > However, in most of those jobs you get paid properly at the time. Aside > from the 1% of musicians who are pop stars, musicians generally do not. The article I read was in the paper edition of the newspaper in question, but here's a fairly similar electronic version: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/03/29/nroyal29.xml&sSheet=/news/2006/03/29/ixhome.html I don't doubt that sessions musicians are paid badly, but multiplying every musician's income by a certain factor doesn't necessarily represent a just solution to that issue. > I'm not saying I agree with extending the copyright period, however I > do think you can't just compare it to 'a day at work'. It's a totally > different set of circumstances which requires a different set of rules > to both encourage artists to continue creating while benefitting > society in the long run too. For some of those musicians (ie. probably not Sir Cliff Richard), it probably was a day at work for which they were badly paid, whilst others (eg. Sir Cliff Richard) went on to make quite a bit of money. Of course, one can always argue that the result of this particular kind of day at work is something that can be enjoyed again and again, but then you should consider the issue of why the person working at the car factory doesn't get paid royalties every time you turn the key in the ignition (even if it's just $0.0001 each time). Paul -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
