[Commons-Law] Re: The gates of intellectual property (Lawrence Liang) (Hasit Seth)

[sudhir at circuit.sarai.net]

Dear all

Thanks Hasit for that interesting post on the early computer industry. I
would suggest that there is one important actor left out of this story -
the University and Research Institutes! 

Most accounts of computer software innovation rely on industry based
innovation models. As you rightly point out a large part of such innovation
is generating clones, marginally differentiated for the market. I am
curious whether innovation in computer software breaks down into the Basic
and Applied Science categories - where basic and fundamental innovation
more often occurs in the University and Research Institute rather than the
software company.

Best
Sudhir

many firms are the level of innovation  On March 15, 5:04 pm Hasit seth
<hbs.law at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Interesting article.  The New Zealand patent if it tries to claim XML
> as being proprietary then it is utterly stupid.  Cannot comment more
> without reading the text of the patent.
>
> I am not a big fan of Microsoft, but as a computer enthusiast I find
> the characterization of Gates and Microsoft in early PC history is
> terribly twisted.    Microsoft's DOS OS was the prime reason for
> personal computing being affordable today.  CP/M the only major "PC"
> OS around at the time was proprietary.  IBM's PC-DOS (developed by MS)
> was expensive (or impossible at one stage) for PC Clone makers to
> license through IBM.  Apple being the paragon of proprietary stuff had
> no interest (and still doesn't) in licensing its OSs.  MS-DOS is what
> ran the PC-Clone market.  Technical merits of MS-DOS is a different
> topic, and GNU certainly didn't make personal computing happen.  If
> one understands the difficulty that Linux is facing today in
> supporting thousands of different types of hardware devices from
> multiple vendors, therein lies the historical value of MS-DOS and
> Microsoft.  Linux enthusiasts are doing an admirable job of supporting
> drivers for a lot of hardware but still a lot needs to be done (e.g.,
> Wireless cards with proprietary firmware are a pain to setup).  DOS
> ran on every kind of PC clone, and Windows still supports the widest
> variety of garden hardware.
>
> Yes, MS monopolized the Windows Application market, but this deserves
> a closer look.  But before that on DOS platform, MS just provided the
> OS - The Wordprocessing package was Wordstar, The Spreadsheet was
> Lotus 1-2-3 and The Database was dBase III+  - all non-MS
> applications.  All these non-MS application makers very quite slow in
> releasing their Windows versions.  Most were so wedded to the text
> based MS-DOS that they just could not make the transition fast enough
> (e.g, dBase III+ or Wordstar).  Nobody wanted to develop applications
> till Windows 3.1 became popular.  MS filled in this space (of course
> with head start from knowing Windows codebase) with acceptable Apps
> such as Word and Excel.  Developing these Apps is hardly a trivial
> task where one can say that MS just hacked together a few pieces of
> off-shelf software.  Just look at the effort required in OpenOffice to
> understand the nature of the task.  Other OS Vendors lost faith in the
> PC market - principal being IBM with a much superior offering of OS/2.
>  MS continued developing both OS and App market, with entry barriers
> getting higher and higher for other players.  Sure they were
> monopolistic, but just look at Apple or IBM in similar circumstances
> and they are no different.
>
> Software is not easy to develop, especially complex and large
> applications.  For example, GNU's Hurd kernel is years in making
> without any significant results.  It is just a damn tough job.  Linux
> enthusiasts will rave about Vi and Emacs, GNU CC and Make as all that
> you need to develop applications.  May be.  But MS's contribution,
> from a purely technical and developer producity viewpoint, in Visual
> Basic is just immense.  Nothing comes close in ease of developing a
> GUI app - whether free or proprietary application.  I know there is a
> ongoing Gambas project to close Visual Basic, but then like most open
> source projects it is a cloning effort.
>
> If we accuse of MS of rehashing and repackaging existing technology,
> open source software is no different with their best efforts being
> admirable clones (some better, some worse) of existing proprietary OSs
> or Applications.   While MS is a terrible company, a classic
> monopolist at many times, its historical role in bringing affordable
> computing to masses cannot be just wished away.
>
> Regards,
> Hasit Seth
>
> >  Message: 2
> >  Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2005 09:35:31 +0530
> >  From: Lawrence Liang <lawrence at altlawforum.org>
> >  Subject: [Commons-Law] The gates of intellectual property
> >  To: Commons Law <commons-law at sarai.net>
> >  Message-ID: <BE5C5CE3.5BF1%lawrence at altlawforum.org>
> >  Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1"
> >
> >  Hi all
> >
> >  Pretty interesting article on the gatesian philosophy of IP
> >
> > > From http://www.nzherald.co.nz/index.cfm?c_id=5&ObjectID=10115247
> >
> >  lawrence
> >
> >  Adam Gifford: Gates up to old tricks over intellectual property
> >   rights
> >
> >  15.03.05
> >
> >
> >  If you wondered how Bill Gates topped the Forbes rich list for the
> >  11th year with a personal fortune of US$46.5 billion ($63
> >  billion), look no further than the New Zealand Intellectual
> >   Property Office.
> >  Patent 525484, accepted by the office and now open for objections
> >  until the end of May, says Microsoft invented and owns the process
> >  whereby a word-processing document stored in a single XML file may
> >  be manipulated by applications that understand XML.
> >
> >  It is one of a raft of patent applications Microsoft has dumped on
> >  the overworked staff of the office, and on patent offices
> >   worldwide.
> >  Some of them might have more merit than this particular piece of
> >  junk, but they are part of a strategic effort by Microsoft to
> >  control another generation of technology, just when its grip on
> >  the personal computer is being undermined by the Open Source
> >   movement.
> >  Gates¹ greatest achievement has never been the software he
> >  created - some is good, some is terrible, a lot is a knock-off of
> >  someone else¹s stuff - but the way he was able to get people to
> >   pay for it.
> >  When the precocious teenager was writing his first bits of code,
> >  computers were rare and expensive and owned by organisations that
> >  would pay people to write programs for them.
> >
> >  That changed in January 1975 when Scientific American Œs cover
> >  featured the Altair 8800, a US$500 kitset computer developed by
> >  Albuquerque research engineer Ed Robert.
> >
> >  Altair users had to solder the kit together and toggle switches to
> >  program the machine.
> >
> >  Gates and his friend, Paul Allen, offered to develop a version of
> >  the BASIC operating system for the Altair. Roberts bought it, and
> >  allowed Gates and Allen to sell copies separately.
> >
> >  When Gates discovered copies of the program were circulating among
> >  hobby computer clubs, he wrote "An open letter to hobbyists",
> >  published in a New Mexico club newsletter.
> >
> >  "Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby
> >  market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC.
> >  Though the initial work only took two months, the three of us have
> >  spent most of the past year documenting, improving and adding
> >   features to BASIC.
> >  "The value of the computer time we have used exceeds US$40,000,"
> >  the outraged Gates told the hobbyists.
> >
> >  He said most Altair owners didn¹t pay for the BASIC they were
> >  using, and the royalties the trio received amounted to less than
> >   US$2 an hour.
> >  "Most of you steal your software," he scolded. That practice would
> >  prevent good software being written.
> >
> >  Gates¹ manifesto set the stage for a software licensing
> >  revolution running alongside the personal computer revolution.
> >
> >  Although many of the hobbyists disagreed with the principle and
> >  baulked at the US$500 price tag Gates and Allen had on their
> >  product, enough paid up to give a useful boost to their fledgling
> >   business.
> >  What rankled with the hobbyists was the fact that the 4kB BASIC
> >  interpreter appeared to be cribbed from other BASIC
> >  implementations in the public domain.
> >
> >  The development work was done on a taxpayer-subsidised PDP-10 at
> >  Harvard University, where Gates was a student. Although they might
> >  have used US$40,000 of computer time, they didn¹t pay for it.
> >
> >  Now the old-time hackers and hobbyists are back. The amount of
> >  good software they have created through the Open Source process,
> >  and the economic value that has had, showed up the flaws in the
> >   Microsoft taxation model.
> >  There are three viable models for software creation: firms,
> >  markets, and community-based peer-production, as Open Source is
> >   sometimes described.
> >  Patents allow firms to create artificial legal barriers that can
> >  hinder or prevent community-based peer-production, as those
> >  communities may lack the resources to apply for patents, object to
> >  patent applications, pay patent licensing fees or defend
> >   themselves from patent litigation.
> >  Allowing software patents is a decision favouring one form of
> >  software production over another.
> >
> >  The internet works because the protocols and software behind it
> >  were developed by peer-production and left free as a software
> >   commons.
> >  Patent 525484 says if a document is created in Extensible Markup
> >  Language or XML, it may contain a schema or set of instructions
> >  for interpreting the document, which will be used when you want to
> >  use another application to make changes to the document. There is
> >  no novelty there. The whole idea of XML was to allow
> >   interoperability.
> >  Interoperability standards have been around for as long as people
> >  realised it would be a good idea for programs to talk to each
> >   other.
> >  The patent should be rejected for obviousness, if not for other
> >  criteria such as prior art.
> >
> >  New Zealand Open Source Society president Peter Harrison said the
> >  society would object.
> >
> >  The society is opposed to patents being issued for software at
> >  all, a point it made in its submission on a bill overhauling
> >   patent legislation.
> >  "Allowing software patents will damage the economy because it
> >  means few small players can enter the field against players with
> >  big software portfolios," Harrison said.
> >
> >  "It creates uncertainty and fear in the software development
> >   field."
> >  Harrison said copyright protection was sufficient for software, as
> >  it allowed creators to license or control use of their creations.
> >
> >  The issue is being able to protect or monopolise an activity just
> >  because you were first to do something obvious. If the patent is
> >  granted, other word-processing programs will not be able to
> >  interact with Microsoft XML word processing documents without
> >   Microsoft¹s permission.
> >  "It means if you write a document in Word and save it in an XML
> >  format, you have to have Microsoft¹s permission to read it or
> >   change it," he said.
> >  Earlier versions of Microsoft Word had no such patent protection,
> >  and although it has taken years to achieve, programs like Open
> >  Office can now interact directly with Word.
> >
> >  Microsoft has spent hundreds of millions, if not billions, over
> >  the years to make its vision of intellectual property rights the
> >  standard. It won its biggest victories at home, but that vision is
> >  now being steamrollered around the world through bilateral free
> >  trade agreements. Politicians still talk of a free trade agreement
> >  as benefiting this country. The reality is intellectual property
> >  rights will be high on the US agenda and it won¹t be to this
> >   country¹s benefit.
> >  ------------------------------
> >
>
>
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