From phm@a2e.de  Wed Jan  2 18:40:11 2002
From: phm@a2e.de (PILCH Hartmut)
Date: Wed, 2 Jan 2002 19:40:11 +0100 (CET)
Subject: [Patents] software "industry"/"engineering" utopia
In-Reply-To: <20020102204855.A27771@margaux.inria.fr>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0201021930480.4809-100000@mulix.oas.a2e.de>

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

> I think not ...  and that is why many industries are trying to convert
> to dealership in intangibles.

which again are levies/taxes raised on tangibles.
Having tangibles as a basis is very important.

> Its roberry, but pays better.

I think it's called "rent-seeking".
In some cases it may not be bad for the economy as a whole.

> The ideal is the factoryless company.

The dream of continuing to control much of the capital while the labor
and dirt associated with the tangibles has already been outsourced to
low-wage countries.  Patents can help make this dream work for a while.

> I am not disputing the rest

You just added one point: the informatics professors are dreaming of
keeping control while others do the programming work.  Many of them are
keen to point out that programming is "mere coding" while their part of
the work is the high art of "inventing".  Coding should, according to this
idea, be done in India, while the patents should be held by university
professors here and in the US.

> > 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,
> >
> > 	http://swpat.ffii.org/stidi/danfu/
> >
> > but of course not exhaustively yet.
> >
> > --
> > Hartmut Pilch                                         http://phm.ffii.org/
> > Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation	    http://swpat.ffii.org/
> > 100000 signatures against software patents      http://www.noepatents.org/
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Patents maillist  -  Patents@liberte.aful.org
> > http://liberte.aful.org/mailman/listinfo/patents
>
> --
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> Bernard.Lang@inria.fr             ,_  /\o    \o/    Tel  +33 1 3963 5644
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