OT Question

  • Thread starter Thread starter John Jay Smith
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John Jay Smith

I wanted some opinions

Should we expand the notion of "freeware" to other physical or
non physical things, like ideas, art, invetions etc?

These would be things of public domain that people would want
to give for free to the world.

Wikipedia talks about freeware als only for programs...

but its such a well known term it would be good to use it for other things
too.

There is only one problem. In freeware the creator may (if he/she wants to)
still have the rights over the program.


an example of an invention released as freeware is the free energy device
patent released a few months ago
http://www.zpenergy.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1981
 
Socialism is failing on a global level. While greed is a part of the world,
it is not greed that drives capitalism, but necessity: how do you stay in
business and continue to produce your product if your product is free?
 
I, personally, am for freedom of information and community involvement in
producing better software, and ideas of infrastructre/implementations. Most
businesses will listen 'somewhat', but by far and large, they tend to do what
they want, period. I am of the belief that software could advance,
considerably, in the areas of UI, better program files utilization (under the
hood, ala Mac), and overall experience. But businesses will always be
stubborn.
 
For thousands of years before the term "software" was invented there was a
notion of ideas, inventions and art that was free. In the early days of the
invention of the terms "Hardware" and "Software", it was confusing as too
which was which. Software was the stuff you could put on a floppy disk, as
those disk were bendable/flexible, hence soft, and hardware was the other
stuff. Today the term software has been used so often that people no longer
confuse which is which.

To start using the term freeware for non software things now seems
unnecessary, lets just continue using the terms that have been used for
millennia prior to the invention of the computer.

Today, there are many ideas and inventions that are free. In the Sciences,
Math, Calculus. Many inventions where never patented and thus were free from
the beginning.

In the future, every book that exists today, every song, movie and invention
whether patented or not, will become free as the copy writes and patents
expire. Recently the patent of using face recognition has expired in the
U.S.A. The GIF compression expired. (On June 20, 2003, the United States
patent on the LZW algorithm expired).

From http://patent-faq.com/abcs.htm ...
"If an idea has not been developed far enough for the inventor to provide
the essential "how to" instructions, it is not yet patentable."

With regard to that free energy device, it defies the laws of physics, and
therefore can not be real.
 
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