(L)GPL remarks and FreeGIS licensing

[Niall Douglas]

On 14 Jan 2003 at 1:47, xdrudis at tinet.org wrote:

> > You don't lose the knowledge itself, but you /do/ lose the 
> > advantage 
> > gained by you knowing it and no one else. That's what patents in
> > general are about, company secrets, government intelligence services
> > and indeed all schools in the western educational paradigm (see
> > "Deschooling society" by Ivan Illich).
> 
> For patents to be worth anything, the knowledge they disclose 
> should not be deductible (is that English?) from available knowledge.
> That means they should disclose new empirical knowledge, or in other
> words, new teachings on controllable uses of forces of nature. 
> 
> Otherwise, the incentive to disclose something you know and 
> nobody else knows is fake, for everybody else can deduce it when
> needed.

It's very very hard for one man to invent something that no one else 
in the world cannot reinvent afterwards if needs be. Especially with 
a working example to study :)

Original 1792 patents were a good idea on the whole and I think a 
back-to-basics approach would do the modern patent system no harm at 
all.

> > If you look at the first actions the British empire took after
> > conquering India, they destroyed the schools, factories and anything
> > which could compete with English industry. In two generations, India
> > had been set back at least a hundred years. This kept them under the
> > imperial yoke until the British sent a really stupid governor over
> > there and prevented the India tea company from doing what it did,
> > and it was only this idiocy that caused the rise of nationalism.
> > 
> > If you take this still further, there is an alarming tendency in
> > British and American companies to try and prevent their employees
> > learning new tricks in case they might up and leave for a better
> > job. I have seen it so many times it hurts, because really they are
> > damaging the common pool of national employees. Then they have the
> > gall to complain about skills shortages and want to import third
> > world labour who can't complain, switch job or do anything but work
> > for peanuts for fear of losing their work visa. This of course means
> > all the locals become unemployed and suck the country dry by being
> > unproductive!
> > 
> > Welcome to the modern working world!
> 
> I get quite lost in this, but I don't think I'm interested. 

You should be. Software patents are a very tiny brick in a very large 
building which has been continuously built for three hundred years. 
The increasing failure of modern systems to govern the world is 
endemic and growing, and will result with total collapse within two 
generations.

The US knows this, it's why it's busy invading resource-rich 
countries to shore up its self-bankrupting economy.

Of course, they are mistaken because it will only stave off the 
inevitable final collapse a few more decades. It's the entire system 
which needs changing, not the injection of more resources. But I 
think that like the British Empire a hundred years ago, the US is too 
believing in its own righteousness to realise until it's too late.

Cheers,
Niall