A Quote by Nathan Myhrvold
In the early days of the software industry, people cared about copyright and didn't give a damn about patents - they copied each other willy-nilly.
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I named my software 'EMAIL,' (a term never used before in the English language), and I even received the first U.S. Copyright for that software, officially recognizing me as The Inventor of Email, at a time when Copyright was the only way to recognize software inventions, since the U.S. Supreme Court was not recognizing software patents.
Into this universe, and why not knowing
Nor whence, like water willy-nilly flowing;
And out of it, as wind along the wate,
I know not whither, willy-nilly blowing.
People willy-nilly borrow for consumption. Civil servants willy-nilly borrow for consumption and then wonder why they don't have enough money at the end of the month.
When it comes to music, movies, literature, paintings, and even Bikram yoga, it's pretty easy to have an opinion about whether something has been copied. Software, on the other hand, was an awkward late addition to the original Copyright Act of 1976, shoehorned into section 102(a) as a 'literary work.'
We are all healers of each other. Look at David Spiegel's fascinating study of putting people together in a support group and seeking that some people in it live twice as long as other people who are not in a support group. I asked David what went on in those groups and he said that people just cared about each other. Nothing big, no deep psychological stuff-people just cared about each other. The reality is that healing happens between people.
I figure that since proprietary software developers use copyright to stop us from sharing, we cooperators can use copyright to give other cooperators an advantage of their own: they can use our code.
My own feeling is that human happiness is a very random thing, and bestows itself willy-nilly, and there's not much deserving about the matter.
People don't give a damn about you and they don't give a damn about your story and they don't give a damn about your content. They only give a damn that you, your content, your story can bring value to them.
If you ask ten different people in the diamond industry about the diamond industry, they'll give you ten completely different answers that are opposing, contradicting each other. And maybe that's the thing about the diamond business.
I remember thinking Democrats and liberals were the good guys. They cared about the little guy. They cared about poor people. They cared about minorities.
It was all absurd, without reason or meaning. People who didn't know each other were going to kill each other over a hill none of them cared about
The worst thing you want is a willy-nilly judge who is swayed by the political whims of the era or the time. What you want is a judge who is thinking about what he or she is doing and is thinking about it in a principled way.
The software patent problem is not limited to Mono. Software patents affect everyone writing software today.
Software patents are dangerous to software developers because they impose monopolies on software ideas.
I have a responsibility to diversity onstage, but one of the things I've heard about our production of 'Boys' is that it's a bunch of white guys. Well, race is a component of this play. You can't just drop people in willy-nilly and say, 'Well, we're going for diversity.'
It's amazing how people can get so excited about a rocket to the moon and not give a damn about smog, oil leaks, the devastation of the environment with pesticides, hunger, disease. When the poor share some of the power that the affluent now monopolize, we will give a damn.
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