Technological Innovation as
an Evolutionary Process
5/1/2004
12:26 PM
side note on
ownership
I
think that the patent office should
a)
get a clue what is prior
art and what is not or
b)
do away with the whole idea of software
patents
- a software engineer (2004)
What is expressed in has to be consider in context, please.
The agenda to reduce to control and the need to capture market share (often by hiding how one’s software works) is powerful due to economic drivers. For the software industry, confusion is good and non-interoperability is good. But for our society, confusion is not necessary and interoperability is necessary. For our society right now, continued confusion by the information sciences will limit our success in the New War.
Great harm might occur if the issues are not being understood.
The harm may come in our government’s over compensating for the fact
that they cannot integrate the information available and cannot see what the
computer programmers’ work (in creating fixed database schema)
does not allow them to see. We may end
up measuring private discourse because we, our government, do not understand
the confusion that is today caused by computer science.
Why cannot the current harm be the cause of the scholars simply saying
NO to the continued control of computer science by business?
Because of the past and current abuses, Corporations should not own the
understanding of how a computer works in an optimal fashion. Corporations should not control an
understanding of how to optimally use the computer.
An understanding of how a computer works should be taught as part of
what we as a Nation need in our K-12 curriculum. With this type of educational material, our citizens will create
the economic values from new types of production systems. Bio-mass conversion production
processes is but one example.
The citizen entrepreneur will be re-born. A sense of fairness in the marketplace will
re-develop. Now, there is a wide spread
feeling that the software industry has created an unfair market place.
The reason why corporations should be restricted and not allowed to own
software patents is because of the great abuse that has and continued to
occur. The abusive corporate behaviors
are based on the practice of aggregating Intellectual Property for an exercise
of monopoly over competition. If the
Supreme Court was to rule on this, we might fundamentally alter the cost
equations for information technology (two billion per year in the US alone) and
health care ( ? several trillion per year ?)
See {+}
The BCNGroup Founding Committee is not making a criticism of capitalism or anything else, we are stating a historical fact and trying to draw attention to the consequences of having specific types of economic drivers in a social system. The economic drivers would never be dominate if the population understood the foundations of mathematics and the nature of our modern natural sciences. Our educational system is not giving most citizens this understanding. We learn to not learn. The two problems, educational and economic monopoly, are entangled.
Almost no one is given access to a complete education about the issues related to the foundations of mathematics and the implications that the foundations have to the use of computers in knowledge representation issues and in issues related to data management and human communication.
For example, "standardization" should make computer technology both simpler and more interoperable. But this is not what happens.