Steve Stites

There is wide spread agreement that the existing software patent system is a mess. Rob Tiller describes several of the proposals to rationalize the software patent system into a workable framework.

Lawyers fight for their clients best interests with the existing framework of laws and court procedure. The tenacity of hard fighting lawyers drives them to turn every possible pathway through the legal system into an advantage for their client which is why the current software patent legal system is an expensive quagmire. If you rationalize the software patent system to some extent with even more rules and perhaps removing a few of the more odious rules then the lawyers will treat this a reset. They will then begin the game anew from the fresh starting point. The software patent mess will be different after reform but it will still be an expensive, irrational drag on the software industry. No matter how the software patent system is reformed it will still be a less than zero sum game with everybody a loser. As time goes on lawyers will make it more expensive. A well done reform will simply temporarily lessen everybody's losses.

The optimal solution for the software patent mess is the one where nobody loses anything. Abolish software patents.

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Steve Stites

"There has been a long debate over what the most central trait of a democracy is. Opinions differ, but there is one question—can the citizens, on a regular basis, re-elect or replace the ruling government in a structured process, without the need for a revolution? With this argument in mind, it becomes apparent that not all open source communities are democratic."

That is true. The politics of the open source movement does not follow the democratic pattern. Open source politics most closely resembles the politics of the majority of the American Indian tribes before the European conquest.

The Indians did not have formal offices. People became leaders based on their personal reputation and there was not a fixed number of influential people per tribe. Over time each individual leader's influence waxed and waned. Political decisions were made by consensus among the influential people. Decisions were rarely unanimous and dissenters only felt partly obligated to follow the majority. For example, when a tribe went to war it was common for some villages to remain neutral and refuse to participate in the war because in those villages the influential people did not want to participate.

I think the American Indian political pattern is a better model for how open source politics works than trying to compare open source politics to either parliamentary or congressional democracy. Leaders arise on merit. Leaders' influence waxes and wanes without any elections, for example Miguel de Icaza. There are no fixed number of leaders. Some people conform to leaders' consensus and others ignore the consensus, for example the Open Office fork. I think if you made a detailed study of open source political decisions that almost every example would conform to the American Indian political system. You would be hard pressed to come up with examples that conform to the parliamentary or congressional systems of democracy.

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Steve Stites