Martin Goetz, Who Received the First Software Patent, Dies at 93
(www.nytimes.com)
from panosalevropoulos@lemmy.ml to linux@lemmy.ml on 29 Oct 2023 16:40
https://lemmy.ml/post/7197236
from panosalevropoulos@lemmy.ml to linux@lemmy.ml on 29 Oct 2023 16:40
https://lemmy.ml/post/7197236
See also ESP Wiki’s entry on Martin Goetz.
threaded - newest
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Martin Goetz, who joined the computer industry in its infancy in the mid-1950s as a programmer working on Univac mainframes and who later received the first U.S. patent for software, died on Oct. 10 at his home in Brighton, Mass.
It was major news in the industry: An article in Computerworld magazine bore the headline “First Patent Is Issued for Software, Full Implications Are Not Known.”
Robin Feldman, a professor at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, said by phone, “The world we live in now, with app stores and software invented in someone’s garage, is a credit to Goetz’s vision, his scientific innovation and dogged persistence.”
“I had the opportunity to tell the world why IBM’s unbundling was a godsend for the user community,” he wrote in 2002 in a two-part memoir published in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Annals of the History of Computing.
His mother, Rose (Friedman) Goetz, worked at the store and, after her husband’s death, at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II.
Mr. Goetz was inducted into the Mainframe Hall of Fame, which cited him as the “father of third-party software.” In 2007, Computerworld named him an “unsung innovator” of the computer industry.
The original article contains 1,188 words, the summary contains 206 words. Saved 83%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Fuck software patents and business method patents. Patent the machine. Copyright the instructions to tell the machine what to do if you must.
Copyright won't help here. Extending it to allow the protection of concepts as well as literal implementation is what Oracle tried to do, and would've resulted in a few megacorps demanding licensing for core concepts that no one can really make quality, functional software without.
Of course, software patents are also stupid, even if the general intent of patents seems reasonable.
Patents should simply be a monopoly on an idea for enough time to gather resources to develop that idea’s prototype. I know it doesn’t work that way, but it should. They really should be there for small inventors, not giant corps who have plenty of resources, but I digress.
But software itself can implement that prototype without having to build anything. Your ideas can be created directly. We don’t patent math and we don’t patent poetry or even poetic writing structures.
Software and business method patents are utter bullshit.
I am glad I am not the only person who feels that way.
Honestly I feel like parents should be limited to companies based on size. Like at least fortune 500 should get extra legal protection, but maybe even straight limited to less than 200 employees and less than a certain capital evaluation (harder one to pin point).
Don’t patents expire faster than copyright tho?
Who cares?
Just wanna dispel the notion that people only do things for money: you’re posting on Lemmy right now.
MUCH faster. Patents last 20 years. Software copyright lasts 70 years after the death of the author
Copyright and patent laws need to die.
.
I’m sure it was something really silly that shouldn’t of got a patient
Shouldn’t of
expired
Shouldn’t’ve, obviously lol
The patent was about a “sorting system”. More info here.
I’m not glad he’s dead, but I’m glad he’s gone.