[Patents] software "industry"/"engineering" utopia

[Bernard Lang <Bernard.Lang@inria.fr> (Bernard Lang)]

On Wed, Jan 02, 2002 at 04:25:50PM +0100, PILCH Hartmut wrote:
> 
> 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.  Its roberry, but pays better.  The ideal
is the factoryless company.

I am not disputing the rest

> 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/
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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