Re: Patents to be Auctioned

Dudley Mills wrote:
> Not interested in fights. I used GNU’s bison and yacc 15 years ago to build a
> computer language parser and was very pleased with it. I hope the contributors
> eventually went on to make some money to support themselves in their old age. 
Dudley,

You're still on the old 'shoemaker' system, where the only profit an 
artesan have is by selling the goods and the only way of getting better 
shoes is protecting your ideas. It's like coca-cola, I don't give a damn 
about the formula, any other company with the same history (war and 
stuff) with the same budget for marketing selling batery acid as cold 
drink would be in the same place as "the coca-cola company".

Everything I did personally (and now professionaly) is GPL or more 
recently my blog and wiki is Creative Commons which in essesnce means 
that it's free to use, change, copy but not sell and always link to the 
original source.

As it is, I can't charge a penny nor I want to build a tool to charge 
for support later (although there are many serious companies that does), 
I just want to share whatever knowledge I've acquired with the community 
for free (as in speech).

Than you ask, what do you get in exchange? More knowledge, just as 
Martin described. The same knowledge that empowered you to think of your 
patents. I got it for free and don't think it's fair to charge for my part.

Where do I get the money, then? Lots of companies today (private, 
public, scientific) are using lots of open source tools and I have a 
good knowledge on some of them (given to me for free), that guarantees 
me jobs in zillions of places. Whenever I work with those tools I give 
back what I have learnt through my blog, wiki, usenet, mailing lists, 
and code. That's my payment for the community.

We all work, we all get paid, but none of us charge the community for 
something it was given us for free, it just wouldn't be fair. (not to 
mention the susceptibility of patents for software).

You're retired, share your ideas, be famous, go give talks in the 
caribbean, show up in magazine covers, etc. This is the time in your 
life you should think about living and not making money... (my 2 pence, 
sorry if it's too personal)

cheers,
--renato

Received on Saturday, 19 January 2008 12:15:36 UTC