Martin Goetz, recipient of the first software patent, has died
theregister.com
theregister.com
The software industry has provided a great way of life for me and my family. By allowing people who came from virtually nothing (like me), who lived a generation after him, to have a better life, even absent a diploma, and whether working in someone else's company or starting one.. I owe him a debt of gratitude and thanks.
Rest in Peace, Martin Goetz.
I find it mind blowing that the mere idea of adding a small silly tetris or some other easy way to distract during a long load screen, was patented, and a company could get into trouble if they had the same idea for their game and didn't check if it's something in the category of "no-do".
That patent was active until 2015, when it finally expired. What an absurd reason, on the grand scheme of things, for not being able to have minigames at all in any other game before that year. (not that afterwards we got a lot of that anyways, but that's beside the point)
Now extrapolate that to a myriad of cool ideas that cannot be used, essentially, because an stupid system that says so.
I spent entirely too much time on ezone.com as a kid in the early 2000s. They were Shockwave games, and there was a minigame you could play when the actual game was loading.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/21/technology/martin-goetz-d...
It smacks of someone trying to be cute but lacking the wit to do so without inducing eye rolls. I couldn't do any better, but I'm also not trying to.
That perfectly sums up the register
The article body looks fine to me; only the headline sounded odd, to my US ears.
"So and so has exited with code 0 and his/her resources have been reclaimed by the system"
A human being is more like an event (a fire, a OS process) than like a persisting object.
Once a process (/fire) has ceased running (/burning), you can start a new process (/fire), but it wouldn't be considered an instance of reviving the old process (/fire), which has ended for good.
Passed on Expired and gone to meet its maker Gone off the twig Kick the bucket Pushing up daisies Shuffled off the mortal coil Run down the curtain Joined the choir invisible
f
should do then. Pretty obvious on a gravestone.
I have seen it used when eulogising people that died of natural or medical causes. (And I agree that it's distasteful)
Irreverence has been part of the El Reg reading experience since I can remember. Someone always complains about them writing about "boffins."
If you read the article it seems that he was an early pioneer in the software industry and indie application developers like me probobaly owe him some thanks for that.
But yes, patenting software/algorithms/maths is a stupid idea. Glad that Pythagorus didn't patent a^2 = b^2 + c^2.
And about Pythagoras and cults...
Holy non-sequitur, Batman.
How about the idea that people have ever used a publicly disclosed technique that has aged out of patent protection? (Including indirectly, such as by using a library incorporating the technique)?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37987214
You can't use information that ia kept secret from you.
Yes, keeping software in house and selling services around itbinstead of releasing software has been a popular option as long as software has existed, and changing the IP landscape (or any other part of the legal and business context) in a way which changes the relative incentives between those options changes the frequency at which one option is chosen over the other.
And that's even before considering the way that changing the IP landscape impacts the decision of whether it is worthwhile to develop software for a given market at all.
What goes back to the initial reply you got, nobody every read a software patent to understand an algorithm. People would rather decompile and deobfuscate your binary. What has the added benefit that your binary actually contains the algorithm, while most software patents do not really disclose the thing they are reserving.
Algorithm secrecy was historically never a problem in software. Currently with the cloud and SaaS it is starting to be a very narrow one here or there, but since software started being protected, patents never disclosed the things they protected, and there's no movement on making they start to do that.
This is ultimately true of any product. But if you distribute closed-source, compiled software, the only way to discover the secrets is the same as with any product: reverse engineering.
Furthermore, a high percentage of software is never distributed, but exists only as back-end code, or as proprietary software only ever run on-prem.
Nor can you use obvious techniques that some prick has patented either. :(
So the question becomes "is a software algorithm closer to math or an invention?". I would personally argue the former as you can mathematically model basically any algorithm with TLA+ or CSP or something, and as such it shouldn't be patentable, but I will acknowledge I'm not a patent lawyer and as such I'm kind of speaking out of my ass.
Well, yes, and that would hvae been a problem if Pythagoras lived when there was a patent system and wanted to patent it. Which one imagines he might have hacked around by avoiding the disclosure of a patent and keeping it as cult knowledge.
Because, you know, even without a patent system...
If Pythagoras had patented it, the patent would have expired 2600 years ago, meaning you would have had no effect from it.