DSL Talk

Software patents don't affect me.

Chew your gum and close your eyes and nothing can annoy you

"Sorry, but deep down I believe that such attempts to commodify knowledge are just a way of the 'haves' to have more."

John, I agree with you. Human nature tends towards( amongst other debased instincts) greed. Those who innovate and pioneer will always be under attack from those lesser individuals who because of their jealousy and brutality will seek to take by whatever means nessessary that which they desire but are unable to do themselves.

Need we mention certain software companies? or for that matter politicians? I dont agree with Mikshaw, we cant close our eyes and ears and pretend something does exist. We have to maintain a constant vigilance against those who would seek to rip apart that thin veneer of society that maintains the best parts of our humanity.

I know I'm waxing grandiose here but I beleive that this issue is a reflection of a trend in Western Society and the world in general. We only need to look around at what is happening in our world-Ukraine, Africa, middle East etc.

My 2cents.

The USB boot patent is clearly bogus, but there might be some concepts in Fordi's MyDSL Maker that are new and probably patentable. The idea of assembling, packaging, and downloading a portable OS is probably quite new. Especially if it were generalized beyond DSL and ISO images. I could see a future where people with hi-speed always on connections download and boot this custom OS in memory on-the-fly from pre-configured preferences, or off a cached copy if they are ever offline, and just user data lives locally. Problems of system corruption due to partial installs or visuses would be diminished greatly and you could boot the same system preferences on multiple computers at home, at work, and in the car. Updating to th latest version would no longer risk a reformat if something goes wrong.

DSL's small size is opening up all sorts of areas that may well be patenatable. We should probably be writing up such ideas and keeping them somewhere central :-)

"we cant close our eyes and ears and pretend something does exist."

I was just kidding....I hate software patents, and have much loathing for those who purchase them...particularly when they're ideas which are already in use by others. But there will always be some asshole who wants to own everything, and society, at least American society, caters to this twisted behavior.

I hope you're not suggesting the DSL community consider buying patents of their own. Software patents are evil, and are the enemy of open source development. Copyright and license goes far enough to show who "owns" a program, but no one owns an idea.

Sorry Mikshaw...Software patents do suck...I guess I just listened to too much NPR the other day...;-)

you can't eat patents.
You can't even play with patents. (Only Americans want patents I guess.)
You can play with DSL without patents!
And this portable OS is just the beginning. When I go to internetcafe, I take with me my OS name and password. OS name for downloading OS and password for downloading personal data, preferences, and what's needed.
It is the end of the world as we know it.
And how about a public password? Ever thought about that? You only need a piece of paper with your full name and you will find everything: your personal OS, your personal data, everything. (Perhaps this is a bad idea when you do internet banking.)

In the US one could patent a software concept. This is really idiotic, how could an idea be patented? Imagine if one company owned the rites to the wheel? Or, writing?

The problem with the issue is that it is too esoteric to register with non-geeks even though it is sure to impact them even more than a code maverick.