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Comment by olewhalehunter | Hacker News Reader

The entire software industry is built on intellectual property law, the government threat of lethal force if I reuse scientific efforts.

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If value isn't created out of "thin air", so to speak, their is no intellectual property for people to want, and nothing for the government to bother enforcing.

You are trying to argue that people don't create value with software because you dislike what they do with value once they've created it.

Much of that "value" is built on the fact that previous code, or dependencies, aren't available to the commons, either for reuse or for inspection (security experts "create value" from fixing flaws caused by proprietary hardware or software, software consultants "create value" when they fix the same types of issues across frameworks or systems): artificial scarcity and broken Windows (pun intended) fallacies abound.

So Linux has no value? GCC has no value? You seem to be arguing software only creates value because there are patents artificially protecting it, when in fact, many proponents of patent reform argue that by eliminating software patents even more value could be created "out of thin air".

Also, software patents do not prevent you from releasing open source software; you can have a patent and release the source of your implementation. They are not related at all.

Linux's value stems from the fact that it works on a lot of (proprietary) hardware and from the scarcity of robust open source OS's among mostly proprietary ones preferred and taught to students or employees through education suppliers and government contracts, it is hardly the magical gift of a free market (one sans IP law and subsidies).

Linux is not the gift of any system. Linux is an example of “value added out of nothing”. It is also an example of “value added out of nothing” that is both patent free and open source. Whatever the system is, value can be added out of nothing by for example creating art, writing a book, and even writing software.

Your problems with patents or the free market make no difference to that.

Products and their consumers don't climb out of empty voids, and a system with government enforced patents, NDAs, or any other IP law is, by definition, not a Free Market.

The entire? Not even close. IP law comes into play at times, but I'd wager it affects less than 1 percent of all software written.

Which is why all these Enterprise software companies are sharing code to build more robust systems right? Systems that never see public licensing are still written under NDAs.

That depends on the license.

The hard majority of industry hardware architectures are proprietary.

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