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Who owns knowledge? And what is Intellectual Property? |
Software
The path of software development is narrow, and very much about knowledge.
- Who owns software ideas and knowledge?
- What kind of software can we claim to own and and how?
- When is the knowledge new or unique enough to patent it?
How do we handleIntellectual Property Rights?
As a software developer how do you know that:
- The system and code that you produce is the unique design of your own, or
- It is based on already free and well known functions and algorithms, and
- It is not based on something that you read in the latest paper and the ideas that you got is the property of someone else.
As an employee or as a consultant, can you promise the employer that the code you deliver is only the product of your own and/or free knowledge and that it becomes the propriety of the company that hired you?
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And what happens if you sell products that may contain proprietary parts? If software that might be "stolen" is hidden from us, or we can't reverse engineer it to analyze it, how can we ever know that it was stolen from somewhere in the first place ?
Legislation's are pushed through in some parts of the world to stop us from examine or analyze software, and if we do, we may have to face a jail sentence! When development is done from and in the "Open source" spirit you openly declare that this system can be examined and used again by other developers.
The solution must be to use and develop the Open Source concept and to internationalize copyright legislation's.
But everything isn't that easy even then. What happens when proprietary code is used, donated or published as might be the case in the SCO/IBMlegal dispute |
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