patents

At any time in an OSD project can participants decide to follow a different route. This avoids the "big ball of mud" effect seen in commercial software projects where software pieces long due for overhaul are still moved from release to release. OSD is FAST.

Re-using other OSD products is not only cheaper but also seen as a very clever approach to concentrate on one's own strength. No job preservation tactics involved here.

Go and read Clayton Christensens book on why successful companies miss out on the most important developments and inventions frequently - strictly by doing what the business literature tells them to do, e.g. listen to your customers.

This is probably the one feature that is confusing traditional economists most. How can one share iventions and work freely? People usually are not willing to share things that cost a lot of money. Here we see changes due to thedigital nature of software: There is no price for copying bits - as the music industry had to learn the hard way.

OSD can be seen as the dawn of a new business model and finally also a new model for society: More and more things do no longer the traditional equation of scarceness - price - ownership. Economists told us that things have a price because they are scarce: not everybody can have the same things. And that's why we need the principle of private ownership to avoid fights. And state, government and so on.

But a copy of my music on your machine does not hurt me at all. You using my broadband connection with flat rate does not bother me. Should it bother me if you use my source code? It depends. If I intend to make a living from excluding others from using it? Sure. If I intend to make a living by applying it in more and more solutions, building new stuff by including the work of others then probably no.

And that is the core of the differences between old and new business models, between traditional software companies and OSD: OSD is an accelerating system - you can only make a living by providing new applications of source code constantly in new projects.

Who is paying for it? Customers receiving complete solutions at a much faster rate then ever before.

We have learned that just putting a piece of source code into the public domain does not automatically and miraculously turn it into a piece of art. The Netscape/Mozilla project has shown this clearly. The architecture of Netscapes browser was not geared towards use in OSD projects and it had to be rearchitected completely.

We have learned that an OSD project needs a clean AND OPEN base architecture to be accepted and to start the famous network effect: more and more people joining in. It's like the old story with the first fax machine: it is a useless piece of equipment which gets worth more and more when more machines are bought.

Today the network effect is built into OSD software ON PURPOSE: eclipse is not the plug-in based architecture by accident. It was designed that way to start a network effect. Today not building an architecture that can create a network effect means coding for the trash can.

Besides the sharing property (some have called it "communistic") the clever use of network effects is a core feature of OSD. And it fits perfectly to the ego-driven motivation in this area.

Ok, the decision on software patents affects me and my likes substantially (see below). And I have not been asked. Nor was I involved in the selection of this commission. Nor did I vote on the EU and its goals. Nor will I be allowed to vote on anything substantial - meaning a topic and not some party or person - at least when it comes to Germany. So to me the EU heads and organs are about as legitimized as the king of the kongo (if there is one).

The illusion here is to expect anything democratic at all within the EU decision making process. It boils down to an interpretation of what democracy means. If it is interpreted as "the will of the people" than the processes clearly are undemocratic - the will of the people toward software patents has not been gathered.

If it is interpreted as "the will of people representing the people" than the processes are also undemocratic as the members of parliaments or the EU commission do NOT represent "the people". They represent their respective economic organisation - something the Germans had to finally realize during the last two month when MPs like Laurenz Meyer and many others where caught as being paid by the industry. But this is neither a new fact nor something uncommon. I remember having learned this already at highschool and it was called the lobby system. Of course, after 60 of lobbyism in Germany representatives of the economic powers have long ago taken over control completely - how could it be anything else with the balancing power of direct democracy missing? (Sorry for this but after many years working in Switzerland I have kind of developed a slight feeling for the restrictions a direct democracy can place on the economy. Just compare the rules for immigration or foreign workers with those of the EU. Having people from low-wage countries working here under the conditions of their home country simply kills the economic chances of the workforce here).

Last Friday the head of a large company in Germany told me that the EU has now finally abandoned their plan of achieving a common area with equal and fair social conditions - something they supposedly went for in 1999. Again, no surprises here: I've learned at school and university that the EU is an organization with purely economic purposes - and nothing has changed here since. Except that we now see more clearly what this will mean for the masses.

Only if interpreted as "gone through the usual decision making process in the EU the whole decision can be called democratic. This also means that the whole question of "was it a democratic decision?" is not really very useful.

Much more interesting is why e.g. the representatives of the small and medium businesses where unable to prevent software patents. They will clearly hurt this group and I can only interpret this as a sign of increasing concentration of power in the hands of the large zaibatsus.

In a situation like this with intransparent polictical bodies deciding over chances of many rumors spread and it is sometimes hard to distinguish sheer nonsense from reality. One thing I read was e.g. that Gates threatened the Danish government to relocate 800 developers from a mobile company from Danmark to the states if the Danish government would not vote for software patents. It was on Heise.de but that does not make it any more credible then if it is found somewhere else. And he supposedy spent an evening with the head of the EU commission.

So what? Again, the EU commission is NOT a democratic organ. It represents the economy in an organization that is purely economic in its goals. So why would one need blackmail or bakshish to achieve the goals of the zaibatsus? There is NO conflict of interest between the large corporations and EU politics anyway.

Independent developers and smaller companies will soon realize that they are now being brought into the same structure that we already know e.g. from the car industry. A few big players dominating a large number of smaller companies which in turn suck out the life of their employees to meet the ever tighter budgets.

Independent software developers will disappear or see huge cuts in rates - they cannot create software that is guarenteed to be free of patents.

Did we miss something over the last 30 years of software production in Europe? Did we really miss paying paying US companies immense amounts of money for nothing?

You can give me any patent - no matter how clear and important it is: I would not be able to use it against the zaibatsu's of this world. The reason is simple: a patent is NOT a right in itself. For a patent to be effective one has to have the financial means to defend it - which I do not have. This is the built in factor for the benefit of the large corporations.

Patents CREATE property (see, we are back to the difference to OSD which is based on SHARING and does not understand the concept of property). It is nice to see Microsoft talking about protecting their property through EU law - a property that is only CREATED if the EU laws are changed!!

We don't need software patents. They fulfill no justified role in the context of software development and haven't done so in the last 50 years. Patent timings do not apply to software because routines are not invented - they are found. Patents should not be confused with intellectual property rights on music or video's - these are unrelated things. Software patents would create property (and property rights) where none have been in a way that will only benefit the big guys.

Looking at the global picture gives another reason to abandon any ideas of software patents. We already have a rather perverse situation with medical and pharmaceutical patents in the 3rd world with millions of people dying just to keep up the patent rights of the pharma zaibatsus. Adding another layer

Attacks on open source development will leverage several attack vectors: The right on domainnames will be turned into a weapon against free speech.

Software patents will be used to threaten open source developers and companies. The mere threat of litigation will be enough to kill many projects.

Limiting broadband adsl will be a useful weapon against open source as it makes communication rather expensive.

The EU will continue its lobby driven path to the benefit of the mega-capital.

Digital Restriction Management (DRM) will be used to separate people from their general purpose computers.