From phm@a2e.de  Wed Jan  2 15:25:50 2002
From: phm@a2e.de (PILCH Hartmut)
Date: Wed, 2 Jan 2002 16:25:50 +0100 (CET)
Subject: [Patents] software "industry"/"engineering" utopia
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0201021615130.3801-100000@mulix.oas.a2e.de>

> In US magazines I regularly read terms like "automotive industry" or
> "computer industry" and sometimes even "software industry". However,
> in German language (or French) "Industrie" traditionally is still
> associated with smoking chimneys and assembly lines. But some German
> journalists that aren't capable of more than "word by word"
> translation have in fact begun to use the term "Softwareindustrie"
> (which I despise).

exactly.

> Being a friend of links, I would propose to leave the text as is, but lin=
k
> the word "industry" to its glossary entry 8^)

excellent proposal.
I hope we get the glossary soon and Erik's interesting talk is put into
it.

> Btw, the desire to be considered an actual industry and to be considered =
an
> engineering discipline seems to be quite pronounced with some top-level
> members of the Gesellschaft f=FCr Informatik. I gather that from reading =
their
> publications. I don't understand this (do you?) and I doubt that most of =
the
> GI members think the same way.

Manufacturing of material goods is connected to large profit margins and,
consequently, development and social prestige.

There is, especially in the older generation, a widespread vague hope that
the realm of information processing will become a money machine in the
same way as that of the engineering disciplines, and they believe that
this utopia must be achieved if their discipline is to have any future at
all.  They want to repeat a previous success experience in a different
field.  A very common pattern of human error.  This may have become hard
to understand for a recent generation which grew up with free/opensource
software.  In the 70s and 80s many informaticians probably more or less
consciously asked themselves the question:  "can our discipline generate
wealth for us in the same way as the engineering disciplines did for our
forbears and colleagues?"  And when they saw the wealth of IBM and
Microsoft, they were relieved to find that the answer seemed to be "yes".
They looked at a bright future with gleeful eyes, and patent lawyers were
infected by the enthusiasm.  Only the Microsoft monopolism and the rise of
free/opensource software again started reminding people that information
is different from matter, and this again stirred the emotions, in both
positive and negative ways. The "industry" utopians and patent fans had a
ready explanation in the mid 90s: the Microsoft monopoly was due to the
absence of patents from the "software industry", which is why it was all
the more important to quickly transfer the model of material production
with all its legal systems to the world of informatics, before it is too
late.  Some of the GI people like prof. Endres are actually still
convinced that the true "software engineering" vision can only come true
if the patent system is introduced and purposefully used to eliminate the
"dangerous opensource fad", in Edres' eyes a grave threat to the utopia of
"software engineering" and "industrial-strength software production" etc,
leading away from the path of "true industrial development", which senior
proprietarist utopians had pursued as their fata morgana for several
decades.  Nothing is as strong as long-harboured irrational beliefs. Some
of the patent lawyers who are agitating for software patents may be
fuelled even more by the proprietarist "software industry" and "sofware
engineering" utopia than by their own group egoism.  The same could apply
to people like Greg.  People often choose their role and their profession
on the basis of some vision, and later, when this turns out to be wrong,
it becomes difficult to tell whether it was the vision itself or the
associated career that compromised their ability of judgement.

I tried to address the proprietarist utopian belief in my FAQ,

=09http://swpat.ffii.org/stidi/danfu/

but of course not exhaustively yet.

--=20
Hartmut Pilch                                         http://phm.ffii.org/
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation=09    http://swpat.ffii.org/
100000 signatures against software patents      http://www.noepatents.org/






