Replies

Thank you very much for your respectable post. If I seem irritable, it's simply because I've had to endure unlimited personal attacks from those who feel their own personal legal access to the foreign clones may eventually be jeopardized as our government wakes up to the dangers of open source and especially GPL-licensed software. It's very similar to the hostility shown by those who are dependent on getting their music downloads for free from pirate websites, and you'll notice it's often many of the same characters arguing in protest.

As for your question, yes, I believe you summarized my concerns quite well, America's technological lead is at stake, and when we give our secrets away to foreign governments without reward it's dangerous to our competitive edge. Regarding the "book" question, specific software routines published in reading materials most typically have retained copyright, at least until recently. And the most sophisticated processes, again typically created by our government or for-profit US businesses, weren't available in print due to the loss of technology to others, that may have ultimately returned as a competitor or adversary.

Open source proponents will tell you that copyright remains on their code, which isn't correct in the practical sense, as copyright historically has been used to protect one's work from the use by others, and from infinite duplication. Open source licenses like GPL are actually better defined as "copyleft", and the author loses all control of that code to anyone who wishes to use it.

Hope this answers your question, and thanks again for it.

"...specific software routines..."

Well, here we have a small discrepance of concept.

When I referred to "how to do" vs. implementation it was, in specific, to avoid the copyright issue. "How to do's" are protected by patent law, implementation by copyright law, AFAI understand.

The problem is that, actually, by just filing a patent, a developer is by definition bound to reveal the "how to do" to everybody in the world - even to those lovely commies.

Patent law was created to encourage disclosure. Thanks to it, thousands of discoveries that would have been kept as a secret are published and available (for a fee, or not, depending of the owner) for inventors that otherwise wouldn't have such a large body of knowledge to their disposal. Even with the risk of revealing it to the bad guys the advantage to our progress is worth it. If it's definitely too sensitive let the NSA do their work and keep inventing.

I'm going too long in this post; this is a complex theme. My point is, if IBM gives Linux the "how to do" to make multiprocessor scheduling, yes, they're giving technology away. But it's not at all different of publishing it on a book - or filing a patent, since we know very well that an enemy doesn't care about patents when working in secret against us. IBM is, by disclosing, expecting an advantage for themselves just like a patent filer does.

When IBM gives *code* away, as in, actual implementation, well, that's not a big deal. Even a high schooler can successfully implement that kind of technology by reading a white paper. Trust me on it, I have lots of code with my name on it.