Tim O'Reilly Quotes
Anyone who puts a small gloss on a fundamental technology, calls it proprietary, and then tries to keep others from building on it, is a thief.
O'Reilly, Tim. "The Open Source Paradigm Shift." O'Reilly Media, 2004.
Stallman and others opposed copywriting of software and felt that computer programs were ideas and as such should not be able to be legally monopolized but they had to live with the law as it was. They started the open source software movement where many programmers developed software and made it freely available to the world. However, there were many companies who would take the free software which was very good, package it with their own brand and sell it. Stallman then created the copyleft concept. This meant that the open source programmers legally copyrighted the program and then created a license that anyone could have for free. But the license only gave them the right to use the software or give it freely to others. Charging money would be a copyright violation. So he and many others since used the copyright law to prevent others from interfering with or making money from distribution and Stallman named it “copyleft” meaning the other side of copyright. Thousands of major programs have been distributed this way. In some areas. It has been so successful that the free software became much more widely used than the products of Microsoft, Oracle or any of the other commercial software developers. Website development has become an example. Not only do many use it because the price is right but much of the open source free software is the best of breed. The Obama White House used a copyleft, free program for the White House website, not because they would save money—the Clinton White House had already licensed excellent commercial software. They chose the open source Drupal package because they thought it was the best available at any price.
This has been true for a long time. The United States in its colonial days and its early days of independence stole huge amounts, especially from England. The Lowells stealing the technology and machines for weaving cloth from English companies is one dramatic example. Another is the fact that we did not recognize the copyright laws until the middle of the 19th century. American publishers, including Benjamin Franklin, stole most of the material they published. Thomas Jefferson was a foe of government protection of intellectual property—{605105}.
When Secretary of State, Jefferson ran the first American Patent Office. The Patent system was originally and educational program, not an intellectual property program. Inventors would keep all their technological secrets to themselves. The idea behind the original patent system was to give an inventor a limited monopoly on profiting from his invention in exchange for sharing his information and techniques with his countrymen—thus improving the technological competency of the entire society. The very first patents were available for public inspection for that reason. And even today, copies of patents are available easily for almost no cost. And few American ideas worked as well as our early patent system. Through its educational role and technology transfer, America came from technological nowhere to being the pre-eminent inventing nation of the world. The balance between public access to invention and innovation and preservation of some rights to the creator of intellectual property is key to modern development.
This quotation is an excellent statement of one major viewpoint about patents. However there are others who disagree and many who believe the existing patent system is broken and inhibits innovation. They observe that the vast majority of patents never are developed or reach the public. They also point to major counter-examples to Thomson’s view. The best is the PC which IBM developed and decided NOT to patent it, to encourage people to produce programs, applications and many devices. No product in human history has been more thoroughly developed and adopted by as many people as quickly. More capital investment money has been invested that any other invention. There are many examples where Thompson’s point holds. Vaccines for which there is no patent have not obtained any company who would manufacture it despite the need. The issue is complex with the old view of Thomson certainly not correct, but not entirely wrong either.
One major purpose of the patent system is to get inventors to disclose their inventions and explain how they work and in exchange they get a temporary monopoly to profit from the invention. That is why all patents are available to the public so that science can advance if all other see how something was done. Despite the Douglas View, gadgets have been patented if they had some novel element to their functioning.
Industrial spying and trade secret thefts are very common in the South Korean business culture. Bribery of competitor’s employees is common. In the pre WWII period of Japanese control, the Japanese had a policy of keeping Korea technically backward to produce food cheaply and trade the food to Japan and buy manufactured goods from Japan—a classic colonial strategy. Japanese engineers and other technicians would go to Korea set up facilities but never share their knowledge with the Koreans. If technicians were needed, they would have to come from Japan. None the less there is a cultural blindness and Korean firms will commonly steal technology from anyone—partners or others. The South Korean Governments had looked at this with a blind eye. Many Koreans believe that because of past history the only way that they can survive on world competition is to continue to pilfer technology. However, modern South Korea has excellent technicians and scientists in almost all fields and making the cultural shift to a standard that is more consonant with the majority of the industrial democracies is the great challenge.
Tim O'Reilly is the founder of O'Reilly Media (formerly O'Reilly & Associates). He popularised the terms open source and Web 2.0.
