Re: tlug: RMS and Amazon...

["Manuel M. T. Chakravarty" <chak@example.com>]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com> wrote,

> >>>>> "Scott" == Scott M Stone <sstone@example.com> writes:
> 
>     Scott> Just saw the story on Slashdot about RMS's call for a
>     Scott> boycott of Amazon.com because they're suing based on a
>     Scott> software patent -- not because of any abuse of patent laws,
>     Scott> but simply because they're trying to enforce one.
> 
> Software patents do suck, you know.
[..]

And they suck Big Time!  Personally, I think, software
patents are one of the really big dangers to innovation and
enjoyable software production in the next couple of years.

> Have you done any on the stuff you've written,
> Mr. Professional Programmer Scott, Sir?  If not, your
> professional ethics are, ah, questionable.  Can't afford
> it?  Tough---what happens if an infringement is proved,
> and some of your customers have to take down their systems
> or pay extortionary license fees?

I am actually always a bit surprised when a skilled software
engineer is ignorant of the problem, while at the some time
is becomes more difficult with each day to implement any
kind of sizeable software without infringing on some patent.

Software engineers rejoicing in current software patents is
a bit like allowing somebody to plant a bomb in your head
and handing over the trigger.

> He is an asshole, of course.  But on this issue he's a useful and
> correct asshole.

Actually, quite interestingly, I recently meet rms in
person,[1][2] and after all this online ranting about him, I
was actually quite positively surprised.  He surely is a bit
socially-challenged, but that's probably true for about 95%
of all hacker (you might even call it a requirement :-)

Cheers,
Manuel

[1] Technically, it is the second time, I met him - but the
    first time, I was a first year student and had no clue
    what gnu or who rms is.

[2] Steve, does your most useful email footnote style
    require punctuation to go before or after the footnote
    marker?  In TeX, you have to put the footnote marker
    after the punctuation (otherwise, you get an ugly space
    after the footnoted word).  It seems to look better this 
    way also in ascii...
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