On 14 Dec 2002 at 3:07, Xavi Drudis Ferran wrote:
The big problem with saying software is information is how easy you can get shot down for it. Any half-witted lawyer would shred that argument to pieces and all the protesting in the world will not help you.
We already know we don't agree in this.
Well, I suggest you try your argument in a court of law then! ;)
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.
I don't think many people are paid to reinvent the wheel. You either solve a yet unsolved problem (by tying together other bits of software, of course) or you get something already done. The fact that the unresolved problem is (to some) as uniretesting as a pay roll or as interested as eliptical curve cryptograhy has nothing to do with the fact that it is a new solution to a new problem. This would be called innovative in manufacturing, but it is the norm in software, and so you call it bread and butter.
No you're completely wrong here - the number of internally generated libraries never released to the public addressing a problem is huge. All this code could be reused but isn't. It's precisely this reason why free software is in orders of magnitude more efficient than proprietary - because work gets shared, not replicated.
The fact that innovation in software is typically incremental is a consequence of the fact that it all happens inside a fixed formal framework. But incrementality does not mean lack of innovation.
True, but incremental innovation tends to be obvious stuff. Blue-sky tends to be much less obvious and therefore much more innovative.
That's why I don't value blue-sky innovation so much.
If you look at the history of any science, radical departures while often not successful in themselves, often have a marked influence. Blue-sky innovation is the soul of improvement without which we'd still be using monolithic kernels and non-GUI OS's.
Cheers, Niall