Max M wrote:
>
> From: Samael <samael@dial.pipex.com>
>
> >But comanies won't invest millions of dollars in RD if someone else can
> look
> >at what they;ve donw and just copy them without paying them back for it.
> >
> >Do you really want to live in a world where everyone spends their time
> >waiting for someone else to do some research?
>
> It is a very good and relevant argument, but it has yet to be tested that
> development will be stopped if patents were stopped. Companies shurely would
> not cease to exist, they would spend their money on something else and
> shurely they would still do minimal research to keep an edge.
> Perhaps r&d would just be more distributed as the wealth made by new
> inventions would be distributed too. Curiosity and the small competitive
> edge could probably take us a long way.
>
> I don't know, and we will not know until it is tested.
>
But it is being tested, in the Open Source software community. Cygnus Support
and Red Hat are both successful companies that do research and development
of software and then give away the result. They make money on support. There
are manyu other examples in the Open Source community. Most of the massive
amounts of code they provide is being developed by others, but they are making
significant contributions themselves.