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[Paul Boddie]

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

> The only other way to protect against that would be a software patent,
> and I disagree with their existence on the grounds that it punishes
> those who discover the techniques independently.

And that's not all. Even if you accept the granting of patents for
mathematical or scientific processes (which I don't), it's hard to
justify people privatising the commons by building on the freely
available knowledge which made their own work possible whilst holding a
monopoly which not only prevents others from building on that work, but
also, as you say, from building anything similar independently or
otherwise from the starting point of that prior knowledge.

[...]

> Thankfully we have emulators for most platforms, and hopefully
> litigation won't kill those off.

Hopefully, yes. But the wider issue is that of ownership of culture and
whether such a concept makes sense. When you're having some popular
music involuntarily pumped into your consciousness through multiple
channels of the media, do you not have the right to say that since
you've heard the song in question umpteen times, and that the "rights
holder" was quite happy to have the work broadcast on the radio, on
television, in the shopping mall, at the airport, and so on, that you
should then be able to record the song, play it back whenever, however
and how often you like, or perhaps remix it, parody it, cover it, or
play it backwards at your leisure?

The stuff about patents, small companies supposedly innovating and
popular culture intersect quite nicely around things like copyright
expiry. 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?

[...]

> I think it's quite possible to have a closed binary but an open
> document format, thus allowing the user to migrate away at any point
> while still preserving any 'secrets' in the implementation.

That's the point of view held by certain software vendors, but many
vendors have sadly failed to resist the temptation to lock users in
completely, using every available technique to make it almost
impossible to migrate. And then the end-users are faced with migrating
away from obsolescence. It doesn't matter if it's a Fortune 500 company
or just some individual whose data is at risk: putting the "competitive
advantage" of the vendor before that data is plainly unethical.

Paul