Letters to the editor

Releasing old software into public domain.

Hello!
 
Reading recent discussions in the online media, it is clear that many
people have an issue with the copyright laws that make copyrights remain
in force for many decades.
 
I believe that the Free Software Foundation should release into the public
domain all the software currently under GPL, that is at least 15 years
old, and for which FSF is the sole copyright holder.
 
GPL is a great license because it uses the copyright law to make software
free. However, 15 years should be enough for software to enjoy copyright
protection. Even when our goals are noble, we should not be using the
copyright law beyond the fair limit that we would like it to have.
 
In my opinion, FSF could make a good point by releasing its old software
into the public domain. That would be an example for other copyright
holders, even those who produce non-free software.
 
Possible damage to the free software would be negligible. I cannot
imagine software companies craving for Emacs or gcc sources from 1987.
In fact, I could not even find gcc that old on the GNU FTP site - the
oldest version is dated 1988.
 
You see, 15 years is like eternity for software. One cannot make money
from 15 years old software without twisting the law and doing immoral
things. I cannot imagine the Free Software Foundation suing somebody for
embedding 15 years old software into proprietary applications. Then let's
make it clear to everyone that we won't ever do it.
 
I really hope that FSF will use this opportunity to influence copyright
law and set a good precedent for other software copyright holders.
 
--
Best regards,
Pavel Roskin,
free software developer

Comments (3 posted)

[new] Koha for libraries and ??? for ABA and ??? for HMOs

Dear LWN readers,
 
I recently posted this to gnu-friend.org in response to a <a
href="http://lwn.net/Articles/9255/">link</a> that I followed from LWN
and thought that a wider audience might be more appropriate. The
following is my comment:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
 
This is an awesome thing to do. I'm glad that a single library took the
plunge but it might have been easier and cheaper for a number of them to
invest together.
 
What would be cool is if the American Bar Association, a hugh consumer
of office software, were to spearhead the development of a free software
word processor. They could start with Abiword or one of the many other
packages available. they could then fund the addition of features like
citing legal information, legal templates, a spell checker that
understood the latin terms that are used in legal briefs, etc.. If this
took off then most legal firms (not that they are my favorite entities
in the world) could save millions of dollars on office packages. Further
all of the legal papers that get filed are in the public domain (unless
a judge seals them) so why not use a public format for the documents so
that the public can truly access them. This would certainly make it
easier for non-laywers to get information that they may need.
 
This idea could also be used for the entire health care industry. If
congress wanted to cut costs in the health care industry imagine how far
they could go by making the forms standardized for all parts of the
industry. Insurance should like this as well. If the entire industry
used the same software then all of the documents would be in the same
format - both from the disk storage point of view and from the page
layout point of view. This would make it easier for anyone in the
industry to process information since common fields would always be in
the same place in the document. Everyone in the industry would have
access to the software for free and could thus save millions. The
documents could be exchanged between pharmacies, hospitals, doctors,
patients, insurance companies, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.
without the need to reformat or re-enter the information. There are
literally thousands of different forms that are required by different
insurance carriers and all but one could be eliminated.
 
These are just two examples where free software could benefit entire
industries. Both of these projects are too big to be taken on by a
single lawyer or doctor but the Bar Association is big enough to handle
the leagl word processor and any of the government agencies that I
mentioned could take care of the medical one. Further the government is
large enough that if they mandated that all reports that are submitted
to them be in the new format that everyone else would just kinda fall in
line.
 
The real place that Free Software would be of value is if it simply
eliminated the need for proprietary software in most of the industries
that don't really need it. Obviously I'm not advocating running a
radiation machine on Free Software but the reports that it generates
could certainly be in a common format. Almost all industries could start
to develope their own software: Banking, Investment Houses, Accountants,
etc.. Some software could be used across many industries. Take
scheduling for example: you make appointments at the doctor's office
just like you do to get your hair cut. I think that there would be a
business model in a software development company getting a bunch of
companies from the same industry together and say "Software is an
expense to you. For some upfront money now we can eliminate a large
portion of you software spending in the future." Companies that do not
write software to sell but to run their business on do not compete with
their software (for the most part) so why not level that part of their
playing field so that they can focus their energies in areas where they
do compete.
 
Construction companies and architects are another one that comes to
mind. Let them compete on the price and style of the homes that they
build and eliminate the cost of software. There are many programming
libraries that will run equally well on Winblows as they will on Linux.
We can't expect them to ditch what they are familiar with until we can
prove that everything that they need to run their business will run on a
free OS: GNU/Linux
 
Best Regards,
 
Tres Melton
class5 (at) pacbell.net
 

Comments (none posted)

Make BAD Patents costly

Hi,
 
Today, I realized what is wrong with the Patent system. There are not
enough balances. It doesn't penalize people who create bad patent. We
can't expect Patent Office to know whether a given Patent is about a real
breakthrough. So we should modify the Patent Law in such a way that
creating bad patents would be costly. Basically make it so expensive to
create non-defendable patents that it becomes profitable to challenge bad
patents in court.
 
If a holder loses in court not only does he/she/it loses the ability to use
it but also has to pay for the expenditure of the court case. Since Patents
are used for making money, it must be deemed that the Patent holder was
benefitting illegally, so must be told to pay an amount which depends on
the income of the holder for the duration the patent was in effect. This
must be reduced by the no. of patents the holder has. This fine must be
increased if the patent was done in bad faith. Also the patent should be
made invalid if any point in the patent is found to be invalid. This will
force applicants to make their patents as narrow as necessary.
 
Ofcourse there will need to be some balances to this as well. If a holder
loses on the basis of prior art then the holder should be required to only
pay the case fees, not the fines, if the holder can prove that he/she/it
had no idea that the solution already existed. Also if the holder wins then
the loser must pay the holder the case fees. This will act as a deterrent
to suing without much reason.
 
Also Patent lifetime must be short for software, something like 5yrs should
be fine.
 
-anandsr

Comments (3 posted)