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Djiezes Kraaijst

Legal Pad - Fortune on CNNMoney.com - 0 views

  • A no-fly zone to protect Linux from patent trolls
  • initiative designed to help shield the open-source software community from threats posed by companies or individuals holding dubious software patents and seeking payment for alleged infringements by open-source software products.
  • call to independent open-source software developers all over the world to start submitting their new software inventions to Linux Defenders (Web site due to be operational Tuesday) so that the group’s attorneys and engineers can, for no charge, help shape, structure, and document the invention in the form of a “defensive publication.”
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  • In effect, the defensive-publications initiative mounts a preemptive attack upon those who would try to patent purported software inventions that are not truly novel — i.e., innovations that are already known and in use, though no one may have ever previously bothered to document them, let alone obtain a patent on them, a process usually requiring the hiring of attorneys as well as payment of significant filing fees.
  • The Linux Defenders program is largely the brainchild of Bergelt, who took over as Open Invention Network’s CEO this past February. The program also reflects a new, more proactive role Bergelt envisions for OIN than the group has played in the past.
  • The Linux Defenders program will actually have three components. The first will be a peer-to-patent component that, like New York Law School’s existing program, will reach out to the open-source community in search of evidence of “prior art” — proof of preexisting knowledge or use of certain inventions — that can be used to challenge applications for patents that have been filed but not yet granted.
  • The second component will be a natural extension of the first, to be known as “Post-Grant Peer to Patent,” which will enlist similar community assistance in the search for prior art relevant to patents that have already actually issued. In this case, the goal would be — assuming such prior art is found — to initiate an administrative reexamination proceeding before the U.S. PTO to get the patent invalidated
  • The third component is the defensive-publications initiative.
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    On Tuesday a consortium of technology companies, including IBM (IBM), will launch a new initiative designed to help shield the open-source software community from threats posed by companies or individuals holding dubious software patents and seeking payment for alleged infringements by open-source software products. The most novel feature of the new program, to be known as Linux Defenders, will be its call to independent open-source software developers all over the world to start submitting their new software inventions to Linux Defenders (Web site due to be operational Tuesday) so that the group's attorneys and engineers can, for no charge, help shape, structure, and document the invention in the form of a "defensive publication."
hpmaxi -

How to Make Wealth - 0 views

  • Startups usually involve technology, so much so that the phrase "high-tech startup" is almost redundant. A startup is a small company that takes on a hard technical problem.
  • Here is a brief sketch of the economic proposition. If you're a good hacker in your mid twenties, you can get a job paying about $80,000 per year. So on average such a hacker must be able to do at least $80,000 worth of work per year for the company just to break even
  • and if you focus you can probably get three times as much done in an hour
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  • I'm claiming you could be 36 times more productive than you're expected to be in a random corporate job.
  • then a smart hacker working very hard without any corporate bullshit to slow him down should be able to do work worth about $3 million a year
  • f you want to make a million dollars, you have to endure a million dollars' worth of pain.
  • Bill Gates is a smart, determined, and hardworking man, but you need more than that to make as much money as he has. You also need to be very lucky.
  • If you want to create wealth, it will help to understand what it is. Wealth is not the same thing as money. [3] Wealth is as old as human history. Far older, in fact; ants have wealth. Money is a comparatively recent invention.
  • talking about making money can make it harder to understand how to make money.
  • the craftsmen. Their hand-made objects become store-bought ones.
  • A programmer can sit down in front of a computer and create wealth. A good piece of software is, in itself, a valuable thing.
  • And so it's clearer to programmers that wealth is something that's made, rather than being distributed, like slices of a pie, by some imaginary Daddy
  • we had one programmer who was a sort of monster of productivity
  • A great programmer, on a roll, could create a million dollars worth of wealth in a couple weeks. A mediocre programmer over the same period will generate zero or even negative wealth (e.g. by introducing bugs).
  • The top 5% of programmers probably write 99% of the good software.
  • Hackers often donate their work by writing open source software that anyone can use for free. I am much the richer for the operating system FreeBSD, which I'm running on the computer I'm using now, and so is Yahoo, which runs it on all their servers.
  • You can't go to your boss and say, I'd like to start working ten times as hard, so will you please pay me ten times as much?
  • A programmer, for example, instead of chugging along maintaining and updating an existing piece of software, could write a whole new piece of software, and with it create a new source of revenue.
  • All a company is is a group of people working together to do something people want. It's doing something people want that matters, not joining the group
  • To get rich you need to get yourself in a situation with two things, measurement and leverage. You need to be in a position where your performance can be measured, or there is no way to get paid more by doing more. And you have to have leverage, in the sense that the decisions you make have a big effect.
  • If you're in a job that feels safe, you are not going to get rich, because if there is no danger there is almost certainly no leverage.
  • All you need to do is be part of a small group working on a hard problem
  • Steve Jobs once said that the success or failure of a startup depends on the first ten employees. I agree
  • What is technology? It's technique. It's the way we all do things. And when you discover a new way to do things, its value is multiplied by all the people who use it. It is the proverbial fishing rod, rather than the fish. That's the difference between a startup and a restaurant or a barber shop. You fry eggs or cut hair one customer at a time. Whereas if you solve a technical problem that a lot of people care about, you help everyone who uses your solution. That's leverage
  • If there were two features we could add to our software, both equally valuable in proportion to their difficulty, we'd always take the harder one
  • I can remember times when we were just exhausted after wrestling all day with some horrible technical problem. And I'd be delighted, because something that was hard for us would be impossible for our competitors
  • Start by picking a hard problem, and then at every decision point, take the harder choice.
  • You'd think that a company about to buy you would do a lot of research and decide for themselves how valuable your technology was.
  • Not at all. What they go by is the number of users you have
  • Wealth is what people want, and if people aren't using your software, maybe it's not just because you're bad at marketing. Maybe it's because you haven't made what they want.
  • Now we can recognize this as something hackers already know to avoid: premature optimization. Get a version 1.0 out there as soon as you can. Until you have some users to measure, you're optimizing based on guesses.
  • In that respect the Cold War teaches the same lesson as World War II and, for that matter, most wars in recent history. Don't let a ruling class of warriors and politicians squash the entrepreneurs
  • Let the nerds keep their lunch money, and you rule the world.
Yi Wang

In the Beginning was the Command Line - 0 views

  • Like the Earth's biosphere, the technosphere is very thin compared to what is above and what is below.
    • Yi Wang
       
      beautiful visualization
  • fossilization process
  • temporal arbitrage.
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  • Disney does mediated experiences better than anyone. If they understood what OSes are, and why people use them, they could crush Microsoft in a year or two.
  • But more importantly, it comes out of the fact that, during this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it.
  • lip service
  • How badly we want it can be measured by the size of Bill Gates's fortune.
  • When TCP/IP was invented, running it was an honor reserved for Serious Computers--mainframes and high-powered minicomputers used in technical and commercial settings--and so the protocol is engineered around the assumption that every computer using it is a serious machine, capable of doing many things at once. Not to put too fine a point on it, a Unix machine.
  • Young Americans who leave their great big homogeneous country and visit some other part of the world typically go through several stages of culture shock: first, dumb wide-eyed astonishment. Then a tentative engagement with the new country's manners, cuisine, public transit systems and toilets, leading to a brief period of fatuous confidence that they are instant experts on the new country. As the visit wears on, homesickness begins to set in, and the traveler begins to appreciate, for the first time, how much he or she took for granted at home. At the same time it begins to seem obvious that many of one's own cultures and traditions are essentially arbitrary, and could have been different; driving on the right side of the road, for example. When the traveler returns home and takes stock of the experience, he or she may have learned a good deal more about America than about the country they went to visit.
  • We like plain dealings and straightforward transactions in America.
  • This would simply not be worth the effort, and so "wc" would never be written as an independent program at all. Instead users would have to wait for a word count feature to appear in a commercial software package.
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