User talk:Pmhalupt
I wrote up notes from the reading and lecture for later discussion - testing to see where this gets posted.
I actually think today the patent system with respect to software is not promoting progress due to low novelty/difficulty bar for issuing patents. I personally have patents issued to me that I do feel would be obvious to folks trying to solve the same problem - and some of the biggest litigation in software patents like web page plugs, and 1 click shopping sort of things are very obvious to whoever first would run into the problem. At MSFT we get 1500 bonus for every patent filed and it is greatly encouraged, so we are very aggressive in filing patents.
Patents today waste incredible amounts of resources of intelligent lawyers and programmers filing patents and then fighting over infringement on fairly obvious solutions to problems. These resources could have been used figuring out other tough problems for the benefit to society. Product development is often held up and costs are increased due to the patent activity around the product (acquiring and defending).
The economic rewards in software currently are adequate in the first to market advantage to drive innovation. The only advantage I would give to software patents is some important secrets are made public in the patent filing that otherwise might stay buried in company trade secrets. I think the benefit of patents would be realized if the "novelty" aspect could be beefed up as a requirement so only truly innovative steps forward gained a patent.
Contents
Notes from Lecture 2
The "iron triangle" discussed tonight disturbs me, I see this problem in other areas of our government. In this "iron triangle" system the legislator sponsoring spending in his district want to grow it for campaign points, the bureaucrat administering it wants a bigger budget to manage for his career, and the researchers getting the money to do research all collude with mutual self interest fight for greater budgets. Governments and corporations have to be careful to setup rules and oversight to prevent self-interest of a small group from circumventing the greater public good.
I worry about this conflict of interest in today's federal and state government elections - the payroll and support structure of the government has grown so large there is an inherent built in voting block that will support increasing the payroll size and expenditures for military or social welfare spending. In court cases folks with conflict of interest are precluded from being judge or jury - I wonder as we continue to grow the size of the government if we will need to be tracking conflicts of interest for voting.
Imagine a simple model where the house can only originate spending bills and tax bills, the senate can only originate laws of ethics. So everyone can vote for the senate, but only those who don't have a conflict of interest can vote for the tax/spend house - those who don't work for the government or work for a company that has more than 40% of it's business in contracts or sub-contracts with the government - and I suppose those who get more in social security or welfare than pay in taxes would be considered conflicted too. You'd have to track this at the local, state and federal levels separately for voter eligibility.
IT may make it possible in the future that we could separate out and track such stuff - I wonder if that would be a good use of IT for making Public Policy? Would it result in better more accountable and efficient government?
Notes from lecture 3
I think electronic voting should provide a much better interface for folks - reducing the error introduced by punching the wrong hole in the punch card. For auditing ability I still like the idea of the voting machine printing a paper summary that is submitted - just like the punch card is submitted today. The counting is done by the machines but an audit can be done and random audits should be done.
However I think voting has moved to absentee ballots and will continue to. I personally use it and find it much more convenient than showing up at some location. Making this electronic via an internet login seems much more risky
Lecture 3 - absentee
In the MIT/Caltech paper they didn't like the absentee vote for convenience. I think that the end goal is an accurate vote representative of the people eligible to vote - and if in securing the voting process we add difficulty which will reduce the number of people voting we probably have failed. I am a big fan of absentee and use it - very easy and private.
My open source thoughts for a section/chapter
I am interested in open source issues. In addition to the price/quality pros/cons of Open Source versus standard commercial development - I would like to understand better what real legal risks there are for contributing to open source projects if you work for a commercial software company - or what restrictions there are for using/looking at open source if you work on commercial software. Can you jeopradize the open source or your commercial company if you work on both? Right now at MSFT I don't know for sure but I believe our policy for employees is don't look at open source so you don't get contaminated, don't contribute to open source. I'd like to understand legally what the copyright risks are if a person looks at open source and then works on a commercial software project, and what risks open source has if people who work at software companies contribute to the open source. I think this is an interesting part of the open source issue - as right now open source has a legal cloud over it for IP infrignement - and commercial software developers have a cloud over them (me included) in knowing what we can look at in the open source world. I'd like to explore the MSFT policy for employees on open source (reading and writing), and see if it is rational given the legal facts surrounding the open source licenses. I think this could be a section of a brief on open source.
