Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

When Rob Pike first met rms

commandcenter.blogspot.se

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 58 posts

Re: When Rob Pike first met rms

#31

Post by ahi »

stcredzero wrote: post #24
guard-of-terra wrote: post #2

Software patents are bad, okay? He got into them before that became obvious. Now it is. He is too stubborn or too blind to state this truth; instead he hides behind "business community is still excited". Stallman organizing protest can not be more wrong than Pike not acknowledging the problem.

As a devil's advocate, I'll ask, would software patents be as bad if: 1) The Patent Office gave proper attention to prior art 2) The Patent Office implementation of "obvious" was sane? I'll posit that, given these two stipulations, most of the bad in software patents wouldn't be with us.

Yes, but even if those two stipulations were sufficient, neither seem to be possible with software.

Re: When Rob Pike first met rms

#32

Post by stcredzero »

willvarfar wrote: post #30
stcredzero wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that what you propose is covered by a sane approach to "obviousness."

So you can defeat a patent by claiming you invented it independently later? ... how would that work?

You'd have to prove that you did formulate it independently yourself. There couldn't be other prior art. If your own inventor's journal revealed a large amount of work, that would show the original patent was indeed valid. If you could prove that you did invent it yourself, and that it wasn't that big a deal, the patent should fall.

So to win in your case, you'd have to tread a tightrope between "not enough evidence to show independent origin" and "the thing is obviously substantive enough to warrant a patent."

Most likely, the thing actually is obvious and there would be other prior art, which the Patent Office currently doesn't pay attention to.

Re: When Rob Pike first met rms

#33

Post by stcredzero »

ahi wrote: post #31
stcredzero wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a devil's advocate, I'll ask, would software patents be as bad if: 1) The Patent Office gave proper attention to prior art 2) The Patent Office implementation of "obvious" was sane? I'll posit that, given these two stipulations, most of the bad in software patents wouldn't be with us.

Yes, but even if those two stipulations were sufficient, neither seem to be possible with software.

Please elaborate. Most serious software development uses revision control, which documents dates. Many web app UIs are documented by web crawlers.

Re: When Rob Pike first met rms

#34

Post by kiba »

gcb wrote: post #27
babarock wrote: post #6

I enjoyed the story, but something bothers me (just a little bit). I don't like his attempts at sensationalizing the event: > The protesters were surprised, I think, that my subject was interesting to them. At one point they all applauded spontaneously when I described a feature of the system. Rob Pike is a renown scientist, at the time working on Plan9 , the most exciting project of the moment. He tried to portray t…

Rob Pike is one of my software architects idols. but he is a AT&T/google ambassador. and a public figure. this is a good propaganda piece. it's interesting, but you can't ignore the semiotics of how it makes stallman looks pathetic (no eye contact) and the events all turn out to play right to the good side (a more pragmatic analysis would say that 100% of the audience were people already intending to attend anyway an…

all that said, i believe having both sides is healthy. and i'm not against patents. i learn a lot about reading them. my only 3 grips with the patent system are 1) patents have more legalese than technical details 2) patents last damn too long 3) because of #1 they give out patents for too generic stuff.

Have you ever read Against Intellectual Monopoly? It's a fascinating account against patent and copyright in general.

I learned that the patent and copyright of today are totally not unique to our time. It doesn't matter if you do software or steam engine. Patent trolls exist in both era, and people who we think as heroes, aren't.

Re: When Rob Pike first met rms

#35

Post by fffggg »

stcredzero wrote: post #24
guard-of-terra wrote: post #2

Software patents are bad, okay? He got into them before that became obvious. Now it is. He is too stubborn or too blind to state this truth; instead he hides behind "business community is still excited". Stallman organizing protest can not be more wrong than Pike not acknowledging the problem.

As a devil's advocate, I'll ask, would software patents be as bad if: 1) The Patent Office gave proper attention to prior art 2) The Patent Office implementation of "obvious" was sane? I'll posit that, given these two stipulations, most of the bad in software patents wouldn't be with us.

"would software patents be as bad if"

You've chosen difficult wording here. When you ask if things would be so bad if we lessened their badness the answer is obviously no -- things would be incrementally better if made incrementally better. But this is no more than a tautology. Software patents are bad, in any form. They can be made not-quite-so-bad, but they will always be harmful to the intellectual development of society.

Re: When Rob Pike first met rms

#36

Post by jan_g »

kamaal wrote: post #22
fffggg wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment stood out for me as well, and strikes me as extremely disingenuous. Another that caught my eye was "Free Software is like Free Love, a hippie pipe dream in which computing is free from venality, commercial interests, even capitalism" I was upset that Pike could write such things in 2006 as this is demonstrably untrue -- contrary to being a pipe dream, Free Software has completely replaced the space previ…

>> Free Software has completely replaced the space previously occupied by ATT unix. But, then I realized this piece was authored in 1991, which makes this opinion merely lacking in foresight. I think it would difficult for anybody to predict how things would pan out. Linux wasn't yet there. Perl was still just the sysadmin's tool, yet and extremely powerful one though but still looked like a little advanced awk. Not…

Well, I don't agree with your assessment of Rob Pike. As far as I know he worked with Thompson and Ritchie (who unfortunately passed away last year) and I regard all three of them as one of the most important figures with regards to Unix and systems programming. And they marked the history quite significantly, in my opinion. At least as important as RMS or Linus.

Re: When Rob Pike first met rms

#38

Post by vph »

>"[RMS]: You may have heard that AT&T has a patent on a simple technique called "backing store" which consists of saving the hidden parts of a window in off-screen memory."

Rob Pike didn't seem to correct this as wrong or overly-simplified. If true, the patent is kinda nasty. The idea of saving hidden parts of a window seems like a basic idea to anyone who develops a windows system. I don't this particular idea is deserved to be patented.

Re: When Rob Pike first met rms

#39

Post by pasbesoin »

willvarfar wrote: post #26
pasbesoin wrote: post #14

These reader-oriented top-level Blogspot domains are really starting to piss me off. (The posted URL is blogspot.se, while the author is Pike, who is in the U.S. and most likely uses blogspot.com for his access.) What, again, is the rationale for this? Other than enabling some sort of lame country-specific filtering? P.S. Or is it in part specifically to provide a route around the U.S.'s arbitrary domination/control…

my bad, didn't spot that when I posted it; hadn't even noticed I got redirected to a .se version before. I'm presuming its the same content.

I didn't mean to address particular annoyance at the poster. If annoyance is merited (I'm no longer sure, but based just on the concept/precept of having a "unique" or canonical-shared identifier for content, I'm troubled), then it would be at Blogspot for creating this circumstance.

Re: When Rob Pike first met rms

#40

Post by willvarfar »

pasbesoin wrote: post #39
willvarfar wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my bad, didn't spot that when I posted it; hadn't even noticed I got redirected to a .se version before. I'm presuming its the same content.

I didn't mean to address particular annoyance at the poster. If annoyance is merited (I'm no longer sure, but based just on the concept/precept of having a "unique" or canonical-shared identifier for content, I'm troubled), then it would be at Blogspot for creating this circumstance.

More a surprise than offense.

If blogspot hadn't tried to localise me, I'd have submitted a .com link and HN would have spotted that this story is actually a dupe and we wouldn't be pondering this topic all over again .... :)

Post reply on HN