quick question - is MWM submitting patents for their more innovative, groundbreaking work? Example - cassandra and the draw calls. Is that something you've explored as a potential patent submission so you can license it to other gaming companies and utilize those licenses as a secondary stream of revenue for the company?
Heaven knows dealing with the patent office and patent attorneys is up there with a root canal, but the end result could in some circumstances prove lucrative and are always a plus if some litigious types decided to make a problem for MWM.
This is my personal opinion, and I am not a developer:
Software patents need to be destroyed
I agree with you.
I've been given this some serious thought and the areas where I think software patents would be "usable" it would already be covered by copyright, a.k.a the specific code used to implement that feature.
don't disagree with you and have to deal with this issue with my own business, but it's also not going away anytime soon. As such, it makes sense to explore it as both a potential source of revenue and a defensive posture just in case. Given MWM is a company with little in the way of assets, no revenue, and in an extremely competitive and increasingly political market, to do otherwise would be to invite unnecessary risk.
but yeah, the US patent system is broken and most software and business process patents are ridiculous and counter-productive, i agree.
This is my personal opinion, and I am a developer in a different field:
Software patents need to be destroyed.
Copyright law is the proper IP tool for software. It's all we needed to innovate Linux.
This isn't drug development. Software R&D won't cease without patent protection, and the market is distorted too much by patents' artificial monopolies, especially since the patent often lasts longer than the technology remains viable.
And developers shouldn't have to do f*****g patent searches in order to do their jobs. A lot of what is patented as software is just "X but on a computer" junk, which shouldn't qualify because X isn't patentable, and just adding a computer is not innovative, but is quite obvious to any reasonable practitioners in the field.
I'd love to sit down and write an EDA toolchain because what's out there that's free software is junk conceived around 90's hardware with a little "oh you can render in 3D" thrown in for kicks, maybe. But I have no idea if what I write is patented by Autodesk or Cadence or Mentor Graphics or anyone else, and I don't want to be sued into bankruptcy for coughing up the same idea as some other underpaid engineer did years ago and just not knowing it.
Copyright law gives them all the protection they need because the thing they need protection from is cheating, where someone copies their work outright. They don't need protection from any competition at all, which is what a patent grants.
[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]
IIRC, Microsoft still has a patent, or something, covering the conversion of long filenames to short filenames on FAT filesystems. It's clever, but not really the kind of innovation that required exhaustive R&D. Probably only needed a couple meetings and a day or two of coding and debugging.
This one issue is a huge pain for free software folks because FAT is still used all over the place in things like USB thumb drives, because it's the one filesystem that you can be reasonable sure every OS can read. We've got a workaround, that stuffs random illegal names into the short filename slot, but it's not widespread.
Oh, and exFAT is covered by another (much more recent) patent, so writing software that can talk to it without a license verboten.
[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]
I suspect that when all is said and done there will probably be aspects/features of CoT that will prove to be clever and unique from a software engineering point of view. But I really can't honestly imagine how any of those things would be ground-breaking enough to require patent protection. Copyrights and licensing would be the way to go if anything.
MWM is working to create a new MMO but there are hundreds of other companies out there effectively doing the same thing. It's not like MWM is trying to come up with a completely new technology like a workable anti-matter generator or some-such. *shrugs*
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]