Re: looks like it's happening everywhere but the US.

On Mon, 2003-10-27 at 08:13, Russell McOrmond wrote:
> 
> On 27 Oct 2003, Jan C. Depner wrote:
> 
> > If you're waiting for the US government to stop advocating proprietary
> > software as part of it's foreign policy you've got a long wait. 
> > Micro$oft represents a large chunk of change.  Why would we want to stop
> > making money from foreign markets?
> 
>   Unless you are Microsoft, how does what benefits Microsoft become "WE"?  
> I thought we all got past the "What's good for GM ..." mindset.
> 

	Multithousand employees, multibillion dollars in taxes.  'Nuff said?


>   The US economy is as much a looser from the "software manufacturing"
> sector as foreign markets are.  Looking at things only from the suppliers
> point of view never really makes sense.  For most of the economy,
> including (and some say especially) that of the US, software is an expense
> and not a source of revenue.
> 

	So, what you're saying is that our economy would have been better off
if we hadn't started making cars as good as the Japanese did in the
1970s?  Sometimes what is good for GM *is* good for the country.  This
isn't looking at things only from the suppliers point of view. 
Companies are not closed systems they interact with the entire system. 
If they're large they have a large impact.


>   I do not see this inefficient "software manufacturing" methodology as
> good for the US or any other economy.  In fact if the US moves further
> toward "software manufacturing" as the rest of the world moves away then
> the US economy will be at a competitive disadvantage.
> 

	I didn't say I saw it as good for the US economy in the long term. 
What I said was that you won't see a foreign policy change as long as
Micro$oft is pulling in billions of dollars from foreign countries.


> > I have to agree with one thing though - software patents are wrong.  
> > They're actually bad for the market in the long term.  It's just that
> > the companies on top see the short term money gain and start salivating.
> 
>   I think that software patents are like the stock market bubble --
> beliefs in short-term gains cause irrational people to salivate and
> eventually cause their own demise.  Unfortunately they harm the rest of us
> in the process.  I wouldn't mind if software patents were an "opt in"
> thing that didn't apply outside of "software manufacturing".  Having a
> fair use exemption for FLOSS as part of the patent act was one of the
> suggestions I made in my patent report:  http://www.flora.ca/patent2003/
> 

	I don't even think that that is good enough.  "Method of business"
patents are bad in and of themselves.  Also, just because it's FLOSS
doesn't mean it's free.  I think there is a market for software that is
open source but not "free as in beer".  A fair use exemption wouldn't
help those people.


-- 

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Jan C. Depner
Code N43T
Naval Oceanographic Office
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I'm a programmer with a soldering iron, and I'm not afraid to use it.