Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Patents

Author:Ravi Nanavati
Posted:9/21/2000; 11:51:06 PM
Topic:Patents
Msg #:21625 (In response to 21622)
Prev/Next:21624 / 21626

And the idea that you could set out to solve a problem without bothering to see if it has been solved before is horrifying.

It all depends on the cost of the search compared to the cost of solving the problem. My impression of what Carmack means (or at least my personal understanding of the objection to software patents) is:

A programmer wants to do some big, interesting new thing, call it X. He plans to invest a great deal of time and energy into X so he takes care to make sure it hasn't been done before. Since, at that point he has very little invested in X, the relative cost of doing the search is small. While doing X, he also ends up doing A, B, C and D because they were problems that came up along the way. He doesn't invest the time in finding out if A, B, C or D have been done before because taking that time would slow the development of X to a crawl after a great deal of effort has been invested in it: a huge cost. Software patents (especially on smaller inventions) force him to make that investement at no benefit to him and no benefit so society, so the programmer is angry.

I'll also add that finding out whether or not what you're doing has been done before is much harder than it looks, even in the age of the Internet. When working on my Master's thesis I spent 2-3 months reading as much as I could to find out what people had done related to my thesis topic. At the time, I felt that while what I wanted to do was a natural combination of existing technologies, no one had done it before. Imagine how I felt eight months later, the night before I was giving a presentation on my thesis, when I discovered that someone had built a startlingly similar system ten years ago!

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