this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2023
195 points (94.1% liked)

Linux

49701 readers
902 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
all 18 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 107 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Fuck software patents and business method patents. Patent the machine. Copyright the instructions to tell the machine what to do if you must.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Copyright won't help here. Extending it to allow the protection of concepts as well as literal implementation is what Oracle tried to do, and would've resulted in a few megacorps demanding licensing for core concepts that no one can really make quality, functional software without.

Of course, software patents are also stupid, even if the general intent of patents seems reasonable.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Patents should simply be a monopoly on an idea for enough time to gather resources to develop that idea's prototype. I know it doesn't work that way, but it should. They really should be there for small inventors, not giant corps who have plenty of resources, but I digress.

But software itself can implement that prototype without having to build anything. Your ideas can be created directly. We don't patent math and we don't patent poetry or even poetic writing structures.

Software and business method patents are utter bullshit.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I am glad I am not the only person who feels that way.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Honestly I feel like parents should be limited to companies based on size. Like at least fortune 500 should get extra legal protection, but maybe even straight limited to less than 200 employees and less than a certain capital evaluation (harder one to pin point).

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Don't patents expire faster than copyright tho?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

MUCH faster. Patents last 20 years. Software copyright lasts 70 years after the death of the author

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Who cares?

Just wanna dispel the notion that people only do things for money: you're posting on Lemmy right now.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Copyright and patent laws need to die.

[–] circuscritic 2 points 1 year ago

I thought you were being a shitbag by bringing this up in a thread about his death.

But the more I read, I realized you were wrong...for not being more aggressive in denouncing him.

Fuck. This. Guy.

Goetz disapproved of the software development practices in the 1950s and 1960s, where software was not sold and was instead given away and exchanged gratis. He argued that there is no difference between hardware and software, and that if hardware is patentable, software deserves the same treatment:[1]:8

He viewed software as an industry that should become commercial like other types of companies and disagreed with IBM's practice of putting their software in the public domain. In his view, patents would spearhead the commercialization of software:[1]:9

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:


Martin Goetz, who joined the computer industry in its infancy in the mid-1950s as a programmer working on Univac mainframes and who later received the first U.S. patent for software, died on Oct. 10 at his home in Brighton, Mass.

It was major news in the industry: An article in Computerworld magazine bore the headline “First Patent Is Issued for Software, Full Implications Are Not Known.”

Robin Feldman, a professor at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, said by phone, “The world we live in now, with app stores and software invented in someone’s garage, is a credit to Goetz’s vision, his scientific innovation and dogged persistence.”

“I had the opportunity to tell the world why IBM’s unbundling was a godsend for the user community,” he wrote in 2002 in a two-part memoir published in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Annals of the History of Computing.

His mother, Rose (Friedman) Goetz, worked at the store and, after her husband’s death, at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II.

Mr. Goetz was inducted into the Mainframe Hall of Fame, which cited him as the “father of third-party software.” In 2007, Computerworld named him an “unsung innovator” of the computer industry.


The original article contains 1,188 words, the summary contains 206 words. Saved 83%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'm sure it was something really silly that shouldn't of got a patient

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

The patent was about a "sorting system". More info here.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Shouldn't've, obviously lol