On Fri, 2002-12-13 at 17:02, Niall Douglas wrote:
So don't tell me there's no incentive to innovate, because innovate is what programmers do for a living. Setting up patents to incentivate innovation in knowledge economy is like granting monopoly for tightening bolts in industrial economy.
I'd also disagree with this. Most software engineers I /believe/ work in tying together other bits of software and producing a non- innovative work. I have no hard figures on this, but the bespoke software industry is mostly bread and butter programming doing nothing new and original at all.
Sorry, but you are confusing invention with innovation. innovation has not much in common with invention.
If you take 2 known peaces of software and combine them to make something useful that's innovation, even if you used well known technology and concepts.
I'm using the term invention here more like most people intend it then like patent attorneys intend it tough.
Simo.