> The protesters were surprised, I think, that my subject was interesting to them. At one point they all applauded spontaneously when I described a feature of the system.

Rob Pike is a renown scientist, at the time working on Plan9 , the most exciting project of the moment. He tried to portray the protesters as mindless sheep blindly following rms, where indeed they were smart people genuinely against the idea of software patents. After all, this is MIT we're talking about, is anyone surprised that these guys actually showed interest in Rob's talk?

I know that if I were there, I would've definitely put up a protest sign, while still being thrilled to attend the talk.

and a public figure. this is a good propaganda piece. it's interesting, but you can't ignore the semiotics of how it makes stallman looks pathetic (no eye contact) and the events all turn out to play right to the good side (a more pragmatic analysis would say that 100% of the audience were people already intending to attend anyway and they just decide to do so carrying signs).

all that said, i believe having both sides is healthy. and i'm not against patents. i learn a lot about reading them. my only 3 grips with the patent system are 1) patents have more legalese than technical details 2) patents last damn too long 3) because of #1 they give out patents for too generic stuff.

I used to hang around the FSF/Media Labs frequently as a teenager in the early to mid 1990s (the era this story is from) and met rms several times and this description didn't seem out of place to me at all.

rms is many things, some of them quite admirable, but he is also one of the most socially awkward penguins you could ever meet.

Have you ever read Against Intellectual Monopoly? It's a fascinating account against patent and copyright in general.

I learned that the patent and copyright of today are totally not unique to our time. It doesn't matter if you do software or steam engine. Patent trolls exist in both era, and people who we think as heroes, aren't.

Stallman organizing protest can not be more wrong than Pike not acknowledging the problem.

At the same time I'm a big critic of RMS and his work (from GCC to the GPL, passing by the Free Software Song ;) but he is right that software patents are a very harmful monster.

    1) The Patent Office gave proper attention to prior art
    2) The Patent Office implementation of "obvious" was sane?

For a more recent example, consider NP completeness, proved completely independently by Stephen Cook and Leonid Levin.

Or even reinventions made disparate by time: the Cooley-Tukey FFT was first formulated by Gauss in 1805.

If these inventions are "obvious," then all inventions are obvious. The truth, not widely acknowledged, is that most inventions are as much a product of the environment of the inventor as the inventor themselves. They're not smarter and they're not unique. Patents should not prohibit coincidental parallel invention, only reverse engineering.

Well put. That's exactly the intuition I was trying to express.

... how would that work?

So to win in your case, you'd have to tread a tightrope between "not enough evidence to show independent origin" and "the thing is obviously substantive enough to warrant a patent."

Most likely, the thing actually is obvious and there would be other prior art, which the Patent Office currently doesn't pay attention to.

You've chosen difficult wording here. When you ask if things would be so bad if we lessened their badness the answer is obviously no -- things would be incrementally better if made incrementally better. But this is no more than a tautology. Software patents are bad, in any form. They can be made not-quite-so-bad, but they will always be harmful to the intellectual development of society.

    3) Software patents expire after three years instead of twenty

I wonder what his opinion is now.

Whatever it is, its going to be considered. But it doesn't mean it hasn't evolved.

This is the only part of that post written in 2006:

"I can't find this on the web, so here follows a note I wrote in 1991 of an odd event in my computing career."

Everything after that is from 1991. You have no basis for interpreting the 2006 posting of this 1991 note as anything, save preservation of history.

You could imagine that if he felt differently in 2006 he'd have mentioned it in the preamble?

He posts one or two entries a year in that blog; this note was not some noise he dumped, it was a deliberate posting.

If you actually had any interest in truth, you'd ask him. Instead, you've decided you know what his views and motives are based on no evidence whatsoever, and are asserting your opinion publicly.

Software patents are bad for everyone. Even those who have patents get sued routinely by those who have other patents. They must file patents as "defensive patents", even if they have no intention of using them. The whole situation is predicated on greed and stifles research and innovation. The only folk who make any real gain out it are lawyers.

I respect Rob as a programmer, but that came off as a little too self congratulatory.

In the wider World, we should think twice about criminalizing peaceful protesters, as some recent laws seem to be doing.

cite: http://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/ready-occupy-what-you-n...

I'm not quite sure why Pike wrote this. Was he afraid that the wheelchair concealed a weapon of some sort? But how can you visually verify that a person needs a wheelchair?

I also wonder what Pike thinks now that his employer is being sued over the violations of patents in their open source GUI software. The swipe-to-unlock patent strikes me as about as obvious as backing store.

Considering the sign she had, I think Pike considered the hypothesis that she was using the wheelchair as a "theatrical prop".

(The posted URL is blogspot.se, while the author is Pike, who is in the U.S. and most likely uses blogspot.com for his access.)

What, again, is the rationale for this? Other than enabling some sort of lame country-specific filtering?

P.S. Or is it in part specifically to provide a route around the U.S.'s arbitrary domination/control of .com domains? Symbolic as well, if practically speaking the U.S. government is unlikely to just shut down blogspot.com .

So, I guess I'm going from pissed off to trying to remember past conversation/explanation around this change.

If blogspot hadn't tried to localise me, I'd have submitted a .com link and HN would have spotted that this story is actually a dupe and we wouldn't be pondering this topic all over again .... :)

Written in 2006... O tempora o mores!

Rob Pike didn't seem to correct this as wrong or overly-simplified. If true, the patent is kinda nasty. The idea of saving hidden parts of a window seems like a basic idea to anyone who develops a windows system. I don't this particular idea is deserved to be patented.

This was posted a few years ago and that also resulted in a fairly interesting HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=607335

Earlier in the piece it describes AT&T sending off demands to prospective licensees, and then those licenses being "politely" returned. Is Mr. Pike really so naive that he doesn't understand that the demand for a license is entirely backed by the implicit threat of a lawsuit to force the same? If that weren't the case the participation level would be 0%.

Another that caught my eye was "Free Software is like Free Love, a hippie pipe dream in which computing is free from venality, commercial interests, even capitalism"

I was upset that Pike could write such things in 2006 as this is demonstrably untrue -- contrary to being a pipe dream, Free Software has completely replaced the space previously occupied by ATT unix. But, then I realized this piece was authored in 1991, which makes this opinion merely lacking in foresight.

I think it would difficult for anybody to predict how things would pan out. Linux wasn't yet there. Perl was still just the sysadmin's tool, yet and extremely powerful one though but still looked like a little advanced awk. Not until a couple of years later, when Linux was everywhere. Perl had eaten severely in most languages share.

No body could have predicted somebody could co ordinate an effort like building of a language or kernel from distributed locations, yet managing to build high quality software that would go on to rule the world.

And also look at the kind of people who built it. Although I agree that Linus Torvalds and Larry Wall had strong university background. Development of things like Linux and Perl happened in the most unconventional environments, to solve the most unexpected problems. Software design was taken over by hackers from academics and researches in big labs run by corporates.

For most talented people who didn't participate in those movements at that time, they basically a lost a shot at making their mark in history. Rob Pike is just one of such many smart people who missed the boat. That fact will always remain.

Rob Pike might be a genius. But the future generations of software won't seem him in the same light as RMS, Linus or Larry Wall.

Go is turning into a fantastic language and is likely to have a far bigger real-world footprint than the work on Plan 9 had.

I was told that among MIT undergraduates a bizarre form of political correctness had developed, putting Stallman in charge of a pack of eager misguided nerds who in a healthier environment would probably be protesting the killing of rats in biology class.