X-no-Archive:yes
The Cathedral and the Bazaar it ain't. Linus's response was a bit ad hominem
for my tastes. Actually, I would like to read the source material, Mundie's
actual speech, and not just some reporters "handling" of it (have you ever
had first hand knowledge of a news story, and that news story was actually
accurate?).

Certainly Linus raises some valid points. Clearly, there are problems with
our intellectual property laws and our methods of transmitting knowledge by
classroom lecture, both of which are pre-Gutenberg artifacts (lectures were
dictation, a means of transmitting one's own text). But I notice that Linus
left out Edison, who has been quoted as saying that a patent is an
invitation to a lawsuit. Nevertheless, Edison's patented technologies do
seem to still have everyday implications for us.

There is yet an unresolved tension between what technologies to allow others
to share in (Cisco is credited with doing this), and what to patent. We have
yet to see the full fruits of patenting gene discoveries (perhaps the
Catholic church could file a class action suit on behalf of the Creator
against "faulty" patents?). But it is happening, and happening more, in what
some are calling the most important scientific and technological revolution
of our day. While I have problems with patenting the sequence of a naturally
occurring gene (and do believe it is Another's prior art), I have no problem
with the patenting of some molecule, protein strand, nanobot, or whatever
you can imagine being based upon the discovery of some genomic constructs.

Greg Stigers
http://www.cgiusa.com

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