OSNews

Here's a piece that I posted to a political discussion group along with Eugenia's article. I would like US politicians to become aware of the value of open-source, GNU licensing, and groups like Stallman's Free Software Foundation. I removed mention of the name of a particular firm for this post.

My little note here turned into an editorial also.

C-Span had an excellent Booknotes presentation this morning by
Ted Nace, author of a book called "Gangs of America." It's about
corporations. The discussion got into the history of corporations
going back to the East Indies (?) Tea Company of Great Britain,
which had an army twice as large as the government. Its attempt
to impose a monopoly on tea in the US colonies led to the Boston
Tea Party. Nace also talked about the fascist/business attempt to
engineer what amounted to a coup against FDR and his New Deal,
a topic covered well on Jim Bryant's www.democrats.com as I
recall.

Anyway, Nace's discussion hit on the role of corporations
in society which is a passing interest of mine. He noted a Supreme
Court ruling, (Henry) Ford vs. Dodge (brothers) about automaking,
which effectively ruled that the only standard to be used in running
a corporation is to make money. In other words, nothing, not
environmental improvement, not better health for employees or
better daycare for their kids, not better schools in the city or state,
not even national security, nothing is allowed to stand in the way of
a firm's maximizing profit for its shareholders.

That money-is-everything notion flies in the face of the Free
Software Foundation and its "copyleft" licensing and against
the open-sourcecode approach that gives users free unfettered
rights to examine and even modify the sourcecode of their
programs, recompile it into revised working programs, and
freely contribute their "intellectual capital" to the development
of the software. This is the approach that's brought GNU
Linux to the point that it scares the bejabbers out of Microsoft,
which like the East Indies Tea Company before it, aspires to
achieve virtual monopoly and make everyone run their programs
instead of anyone else's. God forbid that anyone should actually
give away their creations or work in voluntary free collaboration
with others to make something that might compete with Microsoft's
try to achieve global domination in software.

What if volunteers built homes and gave them away? What if people
at the office used Xerox machines to make copies of articles instead
of buying one additional magazine for each employee they want to
read the articles? What if teachers refused to teach the secrets of
reading, or the secrets of physics and chemistry, unless the students
slipped them a little extra beyond what the school board had agreed
to pay them?

At some point, you have to admit that it gets ridiculous to try to turn
knowledge or computer coding or other voluntary contributions into
property that has to be kept secret or at least privately held and can't
be given away freely even by people who choose to do so.

IBM tried this in hardware design 15-20 years ago. When other makers
produced PC clones, IBM came up with one or two proprietary ways
to hook the parts of a PC together, called the PS/2 bus and maybe
another design, and it went nowhere. Trying to turn something generic
into a proprietary cash cow holds back progress and often puts those
who try it on the losing side of technical history. A certain big firm which I won't mention here made some money from the gif graphics format, which used a data compression method
(one of many) that you can read about in an algorithms textbook, but
couldn't put into your own programs without paying that firm a licensing
fee or royalties. Where is that firm today? I think the patent has expired,
but even if not, there are plenty of freely usable alternatives for
compression and for graphics formats. Who needs gifs?

Eugenia's editorial criticizes TRIVIAL patents, like a vertically mounted
box with a small lever that's spring-actuated to quickly make or break
an electrical connection, are what firms are applying for and what the
patent offices of the world are inclined to grant. A patent for a switchbox
to turn your lights off and on, another one for a horizontally mounted
box, another for one that's got two such switches in the same box,
and so forth. A patent for a hemispherical container with a flat base
for holding water for your dog or cat, a patent for a right-handed and
also a left-handed hammer with a nail-puller. Trivial patents are a threat
to progress and enrich only the lawyers who keep track of this nonsense
and sue those who think of something obvious and trivial that's already
on the books.

The following makes the key point that all our stuff, physical products
as well as software, are based on work that's gone before. There is
rarely a truly original creation like Visicalc, the first spreadsheet. All
the spreadsheets since then are just copies and modifications of
Visicalc. For that matter, every scientist who does something called
wonderful can say that he or she reached the heights because of
standing on the shoulders of giants. This is obvious to all except
patent lawyers, judges and sleazy greedy corporations.