Minister locks horns with IT sector

stoke said:
Copyright on software is impossible to enforce.
But, a technique of doing something using software is enforceable as the evidence is on the outside.

i.e. A patent can be identified without running through lines of code.
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Speaking AS a small ISV, you are talking nonsense: It's far easier for smaller 'innovators' to use software techniques (i.e. implementing copy protection) to (more or less) enforce copyright than to have a huge well-funded legal team that can afford to pursue usually larger overseas companies in drawn-out international legal battles over patent infringements. If you go that route you need millions before you even start, to sink purely on legal fees, and you'll be highly lucky if you actually get results from the court before you've been made irrelevant in the market by infringers and if you can even prove infringement (software patenting is a complex and expensive business - you have to basically register patents separately in every country you do business, some may or may not grant the patent and some don't recognise software patents anyway).

Copy protection is how it has been done 'since forever' and by and large it works. It's not perfect but it's cheap and available to even the smallest software developers.

Also the two methods aren't mutually exclusive.

Software patents benefit big, established companies and are terrible for innovation and competition. They very literally and directly, almost by definition, ARE market entry barriers that only large companies can afford.

Most software patents are also ridiculous. Note that, interesting and relevant in light of this, it so happens MS has a South African patent on the concept of using XML to store a word processor document - seriously. This obviously may have direct bearing on OpenOffice, who've been doing that for years.
 
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stoke said:
Yup, much like BEE and AA make for a stronger country, removing the ability to actually make a living from creating ingenious software will save the country, and encourage more software to be created.

:rolleyes:
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That is not what she was gunning for. I think the idea is that Open Source is better...

It is a tough argument, but I think we need to get the full transcript in order to dis her for the statement. From what I hear government is making some serious and very interesting Open Source moves in it's different departments. Moves that will save us tax payers a load of money. Do you know how much money is paid over to 3rd parties by our government on patented systems? I heard of one industrial accounting firm getting more than a R100 million a year fro 1 government department... Hectic!

The Open Source decision was the best decision our government has made in ages. It might have been luck, but it was great!
 
antowan said:
That is not what she was gunning for. I think the idea is that Open Source is better...

It is a tough argument, but I think we need to get the full transcript in order to dis her for the statement. From what I hear government is making some serious and very interesting Open Source moves in it's different departments. Moves that will save us tax payers a load of money. Do you know how much money is paid over to 3rd parties by our government on patented systems? I heard of one industrial accounting firm getting more than a R100 million a year fro 1 government department... Hectic!

The Open Source decision was the best decision our government has made in ages. It might have been luck, but it was great!
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Open Source is very good as long as you have the right people to support it since backup and documentation is limited .
In Israel government departments moved into open source some years ago but they have the right people to support it .
I don't think that South Africa is at the same level of IT as Israel.
Anyway this is not a political issue . If the minister thinks government departments can move to open source , they can just move.
 
stifled innovation

much as i love to hate Microsoft, they have done less damage to this country than guavamint so the pinch of salt i take with the one is slightly smaller than what i take with the other's statements.

open up this cesspool of telecoms / internet we have and see some real innovation, refusing/opposing patents is as likely to stifle innovation as software "hiding" from all behind their patents.
 
Minister locks horns with IT sector
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Hmmm I'm not sure about this - since when has Poison Ivy relinquished her ministerial bovinity from hell status to Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi? - can there really be more than one ministerial bovinity...:confused:

I've only skimmed through the article & not read it properly - am I wrong in my impression that this is all about Microsoft's very boring ongoing aspirations for a proprietary document format in xml, and a guavamental rejection thereof? - there doesn't appear to be much on the actual subject of patents in the article.
 
Wow, this Fraser-Moleketi sounds like he actually knows what he's talking about. Pleasantly surprising! Software patents is almost always bad idea. If you are so ignorant as to suggest otherwise without ever being inhibited by ridiculous patents while working on a large-scale software project, rather read up on all the endless trouble software patents are actually causing. Anyway, nice going Mr Moleketi!
 
psichron said:
Wow, this Fraser-Moleketi sounds like he actually knows what he's talking about. Pleasantly surprising! Software patents is almost always bad idea. If you are so ignorant as to suggest otherwise without ever being inhibited by ridiculous patents while working on a large-scale software project, rather read up on all the endless trouble software patents are actually causing. Anyway, nice going Mr Moleketi!
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Geraldine.
 
Free software means software that respects the users' freedom

Free software means software that respects the users' freedom. (See
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.) It is a matter of
freedom, not price. Microsoft ought to know this by now; when its
representatives say that "there is no such thing free software",
interpreting "free" as "gratis", they deliberately misinterpret the
term in an attempt so sow confusion.

It is quite true that there are computer users, and governments, that
have adopted proprietary software paying no mind to the ethical issues
of software licensing. They are the users and the states that value
only convenience and do not care about freedom. Three cheers to South
Africa for being wiser than they.
 
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