See also ESP Wiki’s entry on Martin Goetz.
Fuck software patents and business method patents. Patent the machine. Copyright the instructions to tell the machine what to do if you must.
Copyright won’t help here. Extending it to allow the protection of concepts as well as literal implementation is what Oracle tried to do, and would’ve resulted in a few megacorps demanding licensing for core concepts that no one can really make quality, functional software without.
Of course, software patents are also stupid, even if the general intent of patents seems reasonable.
Patents should simply be a monopoly on an idea for enough time to gather resources to develop that idea’s prototype. I know it doesn’t work that way, but it should. They really should be there for small inventors, not giant corps who have plenty of resources, but I digress.
But software itself can implement that prototype without having to build anything. Your ideas can be created directly. We don’t patent math and we don’t patent poetry or even poetic writing structures.
Software and business method patents are utter bullshit.
I thought you were being a shitbag by bringing this up in a thread about his death.
But the more I read, I realized you were wrong…for not being more aggressive in denouncing him.
Fuck. This. Guy.
Goetz disapproved of the software development practices in the 1950s and 1960s, where software was not sold and was instead given away and exchanged gratis. He argued that there is no difference between hardware and software, and that if hardware is patentable, software deserves the same treatment:[1]:8
He viewed software as an industry that should become commercial like other types of companies and disagreed with IBM’s practice of putting their software in the public domain. In his view, patents would spearhead the commercialization of software:[1]:9
