Renaud (Ron) OLGIATI <renaud@???> wrote:

> No, they were introduced to guarantee the inventor the exclusivity of his invention for a certain time, so he alone could profit from it during that time.
>
> Introduced to make research economically viable.

And the flip side is that to get a patent, you have to document your invention in public.

Thus the choice of go for a patent and get exclusivity at the expense of telling everyone the details of your new invention. Or keep the details secret - thus leaving others to try, if they can, to reverse engineer it or simply to put their own effort into re-inventing stuff.

Hence the argument that, if people go for a patent, their knowledge then becomes public - and effort that could have been expended on re-inventing that knowledge can be spent on something else. When the patent expires, that knowledge is then out in public for everyone else to use.

Otherwise, what is the point of innovating yourself ? Why spend a lot of time/effort/money inventing something knowing that as soon as you try and sell anything there'll be someone waiting to just copy it and take your market - with the advantage of not having any investment to try and recover ?
Look back in history and you'll see that at one time, "invention" was generally the realm of either :
people who ended up poor because they couldn't profit from their work
or, people who were either wealthy themselves, or had patronage from someone who was

it would be interesting to see if there are many who are truly working in an "open" way, for example working on open source and free software - and actually living from it without being supported by a business making it's money from "non-free" stuff ? I doubt there are many.


But then, this is all getting well off-topic for the list and the thread.
The point remains - neither patents nor DMCA are relevant. Licence terms are relevant (ie whether the copyright holder agrees to you redistributing their blobs), but patents and DMCA are irrelevant as they can apply to free and open software just as much as closed proprietary software.

There's a separate debate as to where to draw the line between being "pure" and not in any way supporting the purveyors of closed software, and being pragmatic in using such things as closed source drivers in order to get a job done. That's off topic for this list and thread as well.