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Comment by eastbound | Hacker News Reader

Before patents, scientists wouldn't share their findings. Patents are an excellent way of making things public domain 20 years later.

We should have the same with software.

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Why? Open source is doing fine.

Instead of patents, the government could just pay scientists who make useful things. Sure it costs government money, but so do the lawsuits.

Or just don't protect trade secrets (the entire point of patents is that trade secrets are harmful to society), and require all software to come with source, the right to have someone change/fix it for you, and the right to share your changes/fixes under a right-to-repair umbrella. Maybe retain a limited (e.g. ~5 year) distribution monopoly on the original (so you could distribute patches but not the full thing).

Source is less important with LLMs now, but it's wasteful and destructive to the planet to have everyone need to use them to reverse engineer things for no reason.

An economy built around not making knowledge prolific is obviously a bad, inefficient idea, and in the end will be our downfall.

So you're saying you strongly support software patents?

Literally nothing in what I wrote would suggest that. In fact the initial "or" contradicts that. There's no need for patents of you just require the knowledge be made available in consumer protection law.

> Or just don't protect trade secrets (the entire point of patents is that trade secrets are harmful to society), and require all software to come with source,

That would infringe upon my freedom as a creator of software. No thanks.

Consumer protection laws infringe on the freedom of manufacturers to screw consumers, yes. That's the idea.

> Before patents, scientists wouldn't share their findings.

But most of science is funded by the government ... shouldn't the taxpayer get something in return?

Fun fact, a lot of software patterns are banned in the EU. Especially pure software patterns.

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