*BSD News Article 5772


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Path: sserve!manuel!munnari.oz.au!uunet!stanford.edu!agate!ucbvax!virtualnews.nyu.edu!brnstnd
From: brnstnd@nyu.edu (D. J. Bernstein)
Newsgroups: comp.org.eff.talk,comp.unix.bsd,comp.os.mach,misc.int-property,alt.suit.att-bsdi,comp.sys.mac.advocacy
Subject: Re: Letter asking for help with Apple from the US VP
Message-ID: <5541.Sep2920.54.1392@virtualnews.nyu.edu>
Date: 29 Sep 92 20:54:13 GMT
References: <1992Sep26.163059.24740@rwwa.COM> <29581.Sep2900.20.3792@virtualnews.nyu.edu> <v_+pvad.mcgregor@netcom.com>
Organization: IR
Lines: 29

In article <v_+pvad.mcgregor@netcom.com> mcgregor@netcom.com (Scott Mcgregor) writes:
> More imporantly, would IBM and
> Unisys have done so? Might we still not have LZW if there were not
> sufficient incentives for commercialization.

All the big corporations had huge research departments and thriving
technical journals long before patents on computer-related inventions
began to appear.

> Clearly IBM and Unisys are in a
> better position to provide an innovative new product to a large market
> than an individual like Mr. Bernstein.

This is not clear at all. The inventions we're talking about came to
market through _publications_, a resource that I can take advantage of
just as easily as an IBM employee. It's not as if IBM introduced a
product using LZW. The researchers simply published what they were
doing. The time was ripe for LZW; multiple groups discovered it and
published it. There is _absolutely no advantage_ to the patent system
here.

> Perhaps LZW would be widely
> used only by "hobbyists" and a "hacker elite" rather than being in use
> in many commercial modems and disk drive compression systems.

There are more than a million computers running software derived from
``compress,'' no thanks to Unisys. This is a ``hacker elite''?

---Dan