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First Nobel Prizewinner forced to reverse-engineer?

jmason quotes The Common Thread: Science, Politics, Ethics and the Human Genome, by John Sulston, head of the Sanger Centre, and a joint winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine:

Once the first fluorescence sequencing machines arrived, it became clear that we had to take control of the software. The machines worked well, but ABI (jm: the vendor) wanted to keep control of the data analysis end by forcing their customers to use their proprietary software. ...

I could not accept that we should be dependent on a commercial company for the handling and assembly of the data we were producing. The company even had ambition to take control of the analysis of the sequence, which was ridiculous. ...

So, one hot summer Sunday afternoon, I sat on the lawn at home with printouts spread all around me and decrypted the ABI file that stored the trace data. ... Within a very few days, Rodger and his group had written display software that showed the traces - and there we were. The St Louis team joined in, and they all went to decrypt more of the ABI files, so that we had complete freedom to design our own display and analysis systems. It transformed our productivity. Previously we'd only been able to get the traces as printouts, which we bound together in fat notebooks ....

I certainly feel that between us we did push ABI back a bit and denied to them complete control of this downstream software. It was the first experience of the kind of battle for control of information that I seem to have been fighting with commercial companies ever since: a foretaste of the much larger battles that would later surround the human genome.

From this summary, his experience is remarkably similar to that of Richard Stallman several years earlier, when the frustration of closed-source printer software helped motivate him to start the GNU project. (The section from Free as in Freedom is also very good.) I think my favourite part of FaiF is the epilogue:

In The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Alex Haley gives readers a rare glimpse of that backstage drama. Stepping out of the ghostwriter role, Haley delivers the book's epilogue in his own voice. The epilogue explains how a freelance reporter originally dismissed as a "tool" and "spy" by the Nation of Islam spokesperson managed to work through personal and political barriers to get Malcolm X's life story on paper.

While I hesitate to compare this book with The Autobiography of Malcolm X, I do owe a debt of gratitude to Haley for his candid epilogue. Over the last 12 months, it has served as a sort of instruction manual on how to deal with a biographical subject who has built an entire career on being disagreeable.

posted Tue 15 Jun 2004 in /issues/patents | link

Technology requires intellectual property rights

David P. Reed makes an interesting (though debatable) point about the necessity of patents:

Date: Sun, 27 May 2001 11:24:25 -0400
To: farber@cis.upenn.edu
From: "David P. Reed" <dpreed@reed.com>
Subject: Re: IP: Re: Software Engineering, Dijkstra, and Hippocrates: ]
Cc: Brad Cox <bcox@virtualschool.edu>

Every once in a while, the "all information must be property" fringe goes over the top in absurdity. Brad Cox's latest note that you forwarded on IP blaming open source for unreliable software engineering deserves a response before it becomes "consensus reality"...feel free to post on IP if you like.

I'd love to see any references that make the case that Civil Engineering (or its "technological maturity") is grounded in intellectual property rights. Especially since the former field is much older than the latter concepts.

As a person with a long-standing and passionate avocation in exploring the history of technological systems, I have never encountered such a claim.

Since civil engineering practice predates the invention of "copyright" and "patent" laws even in their most primitive form, this claim would seem to be absurd. Bridge, cathedral, and road designs were highly mature and scientific without the benefit of "IP protection". In fact, engineers and designers built on each others' designs just fine.

As for mechanical engineers, the same holds true - Roman catapults worked pretty darn well without patent laws, for example.

Buildings did not fall down in the 15th century because we didn't have "effective intellectual property protection".

Even modern mathematics and science were developed quite effectively without "intellectual property protection" to make them "reliable" and bug-free.

I hardly think that Open Source (whatever other problems it may have as it matures) can be blamed for unreliable software because it refuses intellectual property protection.

The most obvious objection is that the rate of progress (or change) is far greater now than it was centuries ago. Most of that I dare say is due to an autocatalyzing effect: the internet speeds medical research; mass production allows more people to go to college. There is a virtuous circle. We can still enquire what started or protected the circle.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc? The fact that the C20th boom has happened in association with a patent system does not necessarily show that patents were the cause, and dpr shows they are not a necessary cause. You might equally well point to the sudden bounty of natural resources under European colonization, or to world wars, or to the American:Soviet cold war as feeding progress.

Even if we assume we live in the best of all possible worlds, we shouldn't conclude everything that has driven us here was either necessary or desirable. And we might be even more skeptical if we hope for some improvment on the world as it is.

[Remainder of software patent argument deferred.]

posted Tue 15 Jul 2003 in /issues/patents | link

Bell tolling for PNG graphics format?

News.com.exe story:

"The big issue is not whether you use GIF or PNG," said Don Marti, president of the Silicon Valley Linux Users Group and Webmaster of Burn All GIFs Web site. "The big issue is whether you let a patent holder become a censor for your communications."

"A patent on communications, or on a format or a standard for communicating, is just like a stamp act," said Marti. "As soon as you decide to use a patented format to communicate, you give the patent holder a dangerous level of power over you."

Nathaniel Smith writes:

Ah, that's right, and gzip is obsolete now too! Anyone know where I can find a copy of compress?

Be sure to read to the very bottom of the article, where Unisys explains that the whole LZW mess is an example of the patent system at its finest. You see, the purpose of patents is to foster innovation, and the LZW patent fostered the creation of the technically superior PNG format. So, it's working correctly!

I am not rightly able to apprehend the confusion of ideas that could provoke such an explanation.

posted Wed 11 Jun 2003 in /issues/patents | link

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