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[Alex Martelli]

Gerhard Fiedler <gelists at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 2006-08-15 12:04:18, Alex Martelli wrote:
> 
> > It just isn't worth Microsoft's while to take the public-relations hit
> > of such a fight: much cheaper for them to re-implement your ideas than
> > to copy your GPL'd code.
> 
> Exactly. So by publishing the ideas as GPL code, the author presents them
> not only the ideas very clearly and well documented, but also an example
> implementation. If there was some R&D work involved, it may be a better
> thing (in terms of protection) not to publish it. The protection from GPL
> is pretty much worthless if the worth is more in the principle than it the
> execution.

Indeed, copyright is specifically meant not to cover ideas.  However, if
you DO care specifically about Microsoft (and that was the company that
was specifically being discussed), I believe you could take advantage of
their policy forbidding employees from accessing GPL-covered materials
(for fear of them being "tainted" by it).  If your fear is not
specifically one of Microsoft, then GPL is less likely to help (and I
won't get into a discussion of trade-secrets vs patents -- things vary
far too much amongst jurisdictions, differently from Copyright which
thanks to the Berne convention is "kinda" internationally standardized).

However, as may already have been mentioned in this thread, distributing
executable code _is_ "publishing" of the ideas it embodies, to all
intents and purposes, since many jurisdictions allow reverse
engineering, and the costs of the reverse engineering are not large for
ideas embodied in software (assuming those ideas _do_ have any
substantial value from a financial viewpoint, of course).  It may be
worth looking into ways of monetizing the ideas that are less easy to
reverse engineer, such as webservices and custom hardware -- that is, as
always, for ideas of substantial worth, financially speaking (that is
different from the cost of the "R&D work", if any, which is a sunk cost
weakly correlated to a competitor's cost for re-developing the ideas
based even just on knowing that what they enable is indeed feasible).


Alex