[Edu-sig] politics,again

[Simon Willison]

Arthur wrote:
> But where were the laws that might have protected the innovators behind the
> Speadsheet or Internet Browser from being ripped off by Microsoft and driven
> from businesses that they effectively created? I guess laws strong enough to
> do that would also have created monopolies - and we would be cowering before
> Lotus instead of Microsoft.  No simple answers is probably the answer.

Bill Gates, in 1991:

"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of 
today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry 
would be at a complete standstill today. I feel certain that some large 
company will patent some obvious thing related to interface, object 
orientation, algorithm, application extension or other crucial 
technique. If we assume this company has no need of any of our patents 
then they have a 17-year right to take as much of our profits as they 
want. The solution to this is patent exchanges with large companies and 
patenting as much as we can. Amazingly we havn't done any patent 
exchanges tha I am aware of. Amazingly we havn't found a way to use our 
licensing position to avoid having our own customers cause patent 
problems for us. I know these aren't simply problems but they deserve 
more effort by both Legal and other groups. For example we need to do a 
patent exchange with HP as part of our new relationship. In many 
application categories straighforward thinking ahead allows you to come 
up with patentable ideas."

The laws were there, but early software developers were too ethical to 
use them.

Cheers,

Simon Willison
http://simon.incutio.com/