On 02/06/07, YKY (Yan King Yin) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
the market). Anyway I propose to remedy this problem by fixing the license price of all patents we acquire, by applying a fixed formula based on individuals' assessment of their contributions.
From having worked on open source projects previously I think you
could be entering a world of pain here, because who assesses individual contributions and upon what basis do you divide up the cash. You'll have developers wasting a lot of time arguing about why their particular contribution was bigger or more important than the next guys.
You keep mentioning the "utopia/dystopia" constrast but is your idea of utopia really attainable? Is your utopia where everyone should give out their ideas for free?
Certainly not. Actually I don't believe in utopias, but am basically guided pragmatically towards the kinds of solutions which are most likely to produce friendly outcomes, and where there is the minimum opportunity for unscrupulous individuals to undermine development or arbitrarily restrict its application. In the world of industry I've seen situations where particular technologies were developed and then ring-fenced by astronomically expensive licences such that only a tiny number of large corporations had access to it. It seems to me that this sort of situation could also easily apply to AI development. As a recent example of this kind of behavior I'd cite certain robotics APIs, and also some of the APIs used for advanced camera based surveillance systems.
Or do you agree that inventors of algorithms etc should be rewarded through *some* accounting methods? The point of my proposal is to reasonably estimate the worth of ideas and thus setting a limit to what patents can extort.
Well I wouldn't have anything to do with software patents, because ultimately they punish small software developers like myself. I don't have either the time or inclination to be a legal expert and research every algorithm before implementing it.
Maybe developers can pay a very small up-front fee in cash, with the rest paid by shares of the future software product? That'd be affordable by developers running on low budgets.
Some small fee for an API would be fine, but requiring developers to be anti-competitive seems very unrealistic. ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=231415&user_secret=e9e40a7e
