On Monday, 1 September 2014 at 05:56:33 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 8/31/2014 10:15 PM, Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> I guess it must be a "keep patent lawyers in work" scheme.
>
> There's another aspect at work with this one. I'm a bit irked that something Andrei and I came up with in 2007 is claimed by others to have been invented 5 years later. A number of features pioneered by D have been showing up in other languages, and D has not been acknowledged.

I agree. I have had the feeling for a long time now that D is some sort of pariah among programming languages. Whatever D offers is never good enough, until one of the big languages rips it, then it's _the_ ultimate new thing!

> I'm happy to acknowledge ideas from other languages that have made it into D, and it is right for other languages to reciprocate.

Yeah, but it never happens, does it? I wonder is that sheer ignorance / carelessness or by design? Anyway, I think that D is not being taken seriously (at least officially), because it is not backed up / owned by one of the big players. It is entirely community driven, which is something big corporations hate, and many users get the (wrong) impression that D is half-baked and not reliable. So they rather put up with Java where they have to wait for useful features for years and are locked into rigid programming paradigms.

> What I don't intend to do is patent D's innovations. What D has done is our gift to the programming community. I'm also glad we're using github, as it is a fine way to document and timestamp the provenance of D's features.

Good on you! But make sure the evidence does not disappear miraculously, if you get my drift.

On Monday, 1 September 2014 at 05:56:33 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> What I don't intend to do is patent D's innovations. What D has done is our gift to the programming community. I'm also glad we're using github, as it is a fine way to document and timestamp the provenance of D's features.

Isn't there some way to "open source" a patent? Or at least, make some sort of formal publication that this was invented, and may not be patented by someone else?

Just because you don't want to "lock down" your inventions, doesn't mean they are free to take...

Then again, it takes a certain kind of corporate greed to try to put a patent on things we'd have never thought of as "inventions".

Did we patent UFCS yet? It's an invention.
How about CTFE? That seems like a *huge* invention?
What about generic tuples? No language I know of uses these.
Static if? Let's patent that too while we're at it.

On 1/09/2014 9:43 p.m., monarch_dodra wrote:
> On Monday, 1 September 2014 at 05:56:33 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> What I don't intend to do is patent D's innovations. What D has done
>> is our gift to the programming community. I'm also glad we're using
>> github, as it is a fine way to document and timestamp the provenance
>> of D's features.
>
> Isn't there some way to "open source" a patent? Or at least, make some
> sort of formal publication that this was invented, and may not be
> patented by someone else?
>
> Just because you don't want to "lock down" your inventions, doesn't mean
> they are free to take...
>
> Then again, it takes a certain kind of corporate greed to try to put a
> patent on things we'd have never thought of as "inventions".
>
> Did we patent UFCS yet? It's an invention.
> How about CTFE? That seems like a *huge* invention?

We didn't invent it. The only thing we did is make it as another part of the "normal" part of the language. LISP family of languages have had the ability to use CTFE for ages.

> What about generic tuples? No language I know of uses these.
> Static if? Let's patent that too while we're at it.

On Sunday, 31 August 2014 at 09:23:28 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> Shoot, "pragmatic" distros like Mint and Ubuntu have done FAR more to get people onboard with, and embracing, and pushing for more open software than ANY purity distro. This is plainly evident. He can't *not* see it.

What distro are they based on? :)

> It's basic marketing: Offer them what they want.

Sure, but it's technically impossible yet. Hence things are the way they are. There's no easy way to talk away real technical issues.

> *No* amount of well-reasoned well-explained logic works, at least not on any meaningful scale. People don't get logic, people don't like reason, people don't give a crap what sounds good on paper or what's in their best interest. "In my best interest" is boring. Dancing cats aren't.

If people don't get logic, don't ask Stallman to appeal to logic, because, as you correctly pointed out, there's no point to do that.

On Monday, 1 September 2014 at 05:26:52 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> The problems come up when you get into the details of how to write those "freedoms" into legalese, for example, the whole dynamic linking issue.  While they now claim that dynamic linking requires full GPL compliance, that's not actually written in the GPLv2 license.

I can see Oracle having the biggest interest in the dynamic linking issue, because MySQL's GPL license can be worked around by dynamic linking. But the issue is really trivial to understand: FSF doesn't want proprietary software to build upon free software, it was clear from day one. That's why in order to use MySQL, proprietary software vendors must buy commercial license and not try to use it under terms of GPL. And FSF has the same interest.

On 1 September 2014 09:27, Nick Sabalausky via Digitalmars-d <digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote:
>
> I can't say I agree with that analogy, but maybe there are either regional or subcultural differences in the connotations of "open".
>
> I see "open" not as being a marketer buzzword, but as clear and concise way to not let Average Joe easily mistake it for meaning "free as in 'free beer'". The fact that we even have the whole "free as in..." thing at all indicates we've already *acknowledged* there's a communication problem with "free". OTOH, when you say "open", everyone knows what you mean. "Free" requires configuring while "Open" just works out-of-the-box. ;)
>

I should have said "More attractive to people in general".  Simply your own comments about free software serves as a partial example of my point.

Everyone knows what you mean when you say "Cloud" too.  Or at least, they get the general idea. (Their heads may go dizzy when you drop saas/paas on them).

Iain.

On Saturday, 30 August 2014 at 17:05:40 UTC, Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Fri, 2014-08-29 at 11:44 +0000, Dicebot via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> […]
>> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_Trade_and_Investment_Partnership#National_sovereignty_and_Investor_State_Dispute_Settlements_.28ISDS.29
>> 
>> I don't want to live on this planet anymore >_<
>> ..yet again.
>
> But we have to!
>
> In a sense this is just the multinational corporations doing what they
> should do create a market to maximize shareholder value. Sadly it is an
> indirect return to a feudal system on a massive scale.
>
> ...
>
> The core problem here is that most politicians are directly or
> indirectly reporting to these corporations as much as to the voters.

I believe this is not the core problem. Core one is that people in general don't care much about those issue and consider many of those attempts perfectly legitimate. It is an education and cultural issue in the first place. You can block few really bad laws by creating enough fuss about it in media but this takes quite an effort. And all they need to do is to push the very same law later under different name, no risk here.

What is even more frustrating the very same people will feel freaking smart by calling you paranoid and pretending that are reasonable pragmatical persons and you are some tin foil hat geek. It is not just the corporations we need to fight but established mass attituded successfully endorsed by those corporations. And _this_ really sucks.

On Monday, 1 September 2014 at 09:48:10 UTC, Rikki Cattermole wrote:
>> Did we patent UFCS yet? It's an invention.
>> How about CTFE? That seems like a *huge* invention?
>
> We didn't invent it. The only thing we did is make it as another part of the "normal" part of the language. LISP family of languages have had the ability to use CTFE for ages.
>
>> What about generic tuples? No language I know of uses these.
>> Static if? Let's patent that too while we're at it.

Yeah speaking about any kind of innovation in programming language domain is usually completely meaningless. Many of theoretical concepts come from as early as 60s-70s it just happened that using them became feasible only recently. Any time I am seeing someone trying to patent _ANY_ language feature I am going to call it bullshit.

On Sun, 2014-08-31 at 22:56 -0700, Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 8/31/2014 10:15 PM, Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> > I guess it must be a "keep patent lawyers in work" scheme.
> 
> There's another aspect at work with this one. I'm a bit irked that something Andrei and I came up with in 2007 is claimed by others to have been invented 5 years later. A number of features pioneered by D have been showing up in other languages, and D has not been acknowledged.

But the USA patent law was changed from "first to invent" to "first to file" so it doesn't matter a jot who invented the invention, only who had the nous and cash to file. Irked no longer matters in the USA patent system, only having the cash to file. The USA patent system is a total mess and must be fought against, especially with the USA trying to enforce it on the rest of the world. EU patent office is already trying to be a subsidiary of the USPTO and it really stinks.

Maybe get the EFF to help get a prior art notice registered with USPTO. Prior art is now the only tool and it is likely the USPTO will totally ignore submissions unless you have big-time lawyers on the case.

> I'm happy to acknowledge ideas from other languages that have made it into D, and it is right for other languages to reciprocate.

In the world of corporations this isn't going to happen, they do not give a shit about science, unless you have a massive offensive patent portfolio.

> What I don't intend to do is patent D's innovations. What D has done is our gift to the programming community. I'm also glad we're using github, as it is a fine way to document and timestamp the provenance of D's features.

So prior art notification is the tool. EFF may be the best recourse.

Lawyers will be able to prove that the repository history is fabricated by calling on high profile shills, aka expert witnesses. You have been involved in all this sort of stuff previously, as have I from a different perspective, nothing has changed except that sane people require even more cynicism to appreciate what is going on.

The only good side of this is that if you ignore the USA market all the problems go away. Until the USA takes over the world – if the Chinese let them.


-- 
Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel@winder.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder

On Mon, 2014-09-01 at 09:43 +0000, monarch_dodra via Digitalmars-d
wrote:
[…]
> Isn't there some way to "open source" a patent? Or at least, make some sort of formal publication that this was invented, and may not be patented by someone else?

No. What you hint at is "prior art" and is a proper defence against (the dark arts and) the award of a patent. At least in the UK. USPTO and increasingly EUPO award well formed patents and do not care about prior art. They treat this as an issue for the courts not for them. Thus unless you have a lawyer who can be heard, you are cannon fodder to be milked for royalties.

> Just because you don't want to "lock down" your inventions, doesn't mean they are free to take...

In the "first to file" USA patent system, yes they are.

> Then again, it takes a certain kind of corporate greed to try to put a patent on things we'd have never thought of as "inventions".

Aren't corporate and greed synonyms?

> Did we patent UFCS yet? It's an invention.
> How about CTFE? That seems like a *huge* invention?
> What about generic tuples? No language I know of uses these.
> Static if? Let's patent that too while we're at it.

In the USA, if you have a lawyer, yes do it. You might get away with it in the EU as well.

"First to file not first to invent" – by the corporations for the corporations. This should tell you everything you need to know about technological innovation in the USA.

-- 
Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel@winder.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder