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Difference between revisions of "Talk:Why abolish software patents"
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== new argument: relying on non-use == | == new argument: relying on non-use == | ||
Revision as of 08:56, 23 May 2011
comment4,
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comment4,
comment4,
new argument: relying on non-use
The new argument added[1] makes a good point at the end:
- Any system of laws that continues to function only because the majority of citizens do NOT exercise their rights under those laws is a broken system.
but I wonder if the first two or three sentences are necessary. Ciaran 14:41, 26 April 2010 (UTC)
- Actually, this gives me a great idea: can we calculate how many software patents would exist if everyone patented their software as much as Microsoft and IBM do?
- Maybe there's a way to estimate the number of patents per thousand lines of code in Microsoft's or IBM's codebase, or in one/some of their products. From there, we could use sourceforge and the BlackDuck database (not sure if that's public) to work out how many software patents are *not* granted because not everyone's using their "right".
- This would illustrate the mess we're heading towards, and it would quantify the imbalance between the haves and the have nots of software patents. Ciaran 14:52, 26 April 2010 (UTC)
Just some thoughts I had last night. I wanted to contribute them to the community. Edit them as you please. Thanks for all you do -- Jason
Software companies and open source organizations are not the only ones producing software. Any company like Wal-Mart or Ford, which has hired a programmer to write software may have created a patentable invention. Local, state, and federal government agencies have also generated a lot of software. It may be useful include potential patents that could have been granted to these organizations in you count.
- That will be harder to measure. I wonder what the best way is... One way might be to look at how many people work in the commercial software industry (where the developers get paid and the software that gets distributed), and how much software was produced - but I'm not confident we could get reliable numbers.
- Or maybe if there are numbers of how many people wrote a certain project (such as Windows95), and how many lines of code were involved, then we could have a very very rough lines-per-programmer figure which we could multiply by some estimation of the people in the sector.
- None of this is urgent, but it's good to have ideas written down so that if anyone stumbles upon such figures that might be useful for this, this is the place to add them. We might be able to make this point in the future. Ciaran 21:28, 26 April 2010 (UTC)
