The thread formerly known as re: Bezos on 1-click ordering

["Schuyler D. Erle" <schuyler@tridity.org>]

Adam Turoff wrote:
> 
> Software patents may very well be an abuse of intellectual property laws,
> due to the nature of prior art and the patent office's definition of
> innovation.

You know, in the course of a long talk on this very subject, I tried to justify Open Source distribution as not merely a viable but indeed an optimal end of software development to my mother, an educated but mostly computer-illiterate person - a good exercise, try it some time - and we came to the following discussion points:

(a) Software is definitely a form of intellectual property, but how does it differ from other forms of IP? One distinction that comes to mind is utility: A book on Perl is an end in and of itself - its has no "use", other than to convey information about the Perl language. But the source to the Perl interpreter is of little intrinsic use to most people, say, as a reference (Perl wizards excepted), but it very definitely has an extrinsic use, which (in its compiled form) is "to interpret Perl programs". How material is this distinction, and how much does it contribute to considerations of "software as a novel IP"? (Or am I splitting hairs here?)

(b) My mother observed similarities between hacker culture and many Native American cultures. In the latter, social prestige is measured, all else being equal, not by how much material goods you acquire (as in mainstream Western culture), but how much you GIVE AWAY. Gift giving for non-charitable purposes is a supreme social grace in many such Native American cultures; the act shows both the wealth and generosity of the giver, in direct proportion to the magnitude of the gift. Now, isn't it interesting that the people who get the most kudos in hacker culture are people like Larry and Linus and Richard Stallman, those people who practically devote their lives to giving away perfectly good software for free? 

SDE
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