Let me play devil's advocate for a minute...

Posted Feb 2, 2009 22:50 UTC (Mon) by danieldk (guest, #27876)
In reply to: Let me play devil's advocate for a minute... by mattdm
Parent article: Apple's touch-screen patent

And in the meanwhile, they build upon inventions and code of *many* other people. Both within and outside the FLOSS community. What mess this world would be in if every significant contributor originally involved in the software they build on (from 4.4BSD to KHTML) sought to patent their inventions? Really, they are standing on the shoulders of giants.

And the practical advantage of inventing things is being the first to the market, and this already paid off well for them, judging the popularity of the iPhone in some countries (or the near omnipresence of the iPod).

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Let me play devil's advocate for a minute...

Posted Feb 4, 2009 2:03 UTC (Wed) by bbb (guest, #49804) [Link] (1 responses)

You are confusing copyright and patents. Copyright is about the code, patents are about ideas.

KHTML was clearly not the first HTML rendering engine. Sir Tim was the first to do that, but then
HTML is just another markup language, so the prior art goes back way into the 60ies. KHTML is no
doubt a great piece of software (and very much non-trivial to write), but there is nothing overly
novel in it.

Similarly, 4.4 BSD in particular and Unix in general consisted mostly of ideas that were present in
one form or other in earlier (research) OSs.

What you are realizing is that producing open source software, even (L)GPL software, may help
parties that you do not agree with. But that is the price of free software.

Let me play devil's advocate for a minute...

Posted Feb 5, 2009 12:33 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

I think the original poster meant patents for the innovations made by those teams, not for the specific products. I don't know much about KHTML, but BSD teams did invent a lot of things: examples [pdf]. "Method and apparatus for paging main memory to disk..."