Character for character is still prevented by copyright. The problem with patents is even if all the characters are different you still get sued.
Copyright doesn't merely extend to character for character copying. For instance, I couldn't write a book about a boy who grows up on a farm, wields a laser sword, wields a mystical form of magic, and flies spaceships around, all the while pursued by the villain who is secretly his father, and a dark magician who also wields an energy sword, could I? The dialogue could differ, the characters not identical, and certain plot elements changed, but it wouldn't really matter, would it?
In literature, you can't protect overall ideas or archetypes. Star Wars itself is based on a commonality of archetypes and legends familiar to many cultures. However, certain elements, when combined, are unique: the mysticism, energy swords, evil empire, space battles, etc.
You can't write a story featuring too much of a combination of those elements.
My point is, copyright is not limited to using the same words. It also covers expression. Otherwise, any wordsmith can say essentially the same thing but using different words and names.
Just like a skilled programmer can use a different method of coding to achieve essentially the same result. Software, like literature, is an expression of an idea. As long as it is specific, should it not enjoy the same protection afforded to literature?
Google is one of the most significant technology developer in the last while. Recent events and their own modus operandi obscure the facts that they make regular fundamental contributions to computer science, whereas Apple's innovation is at a less fundamental level (design, UI, integration, etc.). That's not to say Apple is less innovative. But Google's innovations are the stuff that moves computer science forward at a much lower level, and therefore have the potential to have a stronger and wider legacy.
According to a Fortune article today, Apple is indeed a bigger innovator than Google. But probably surprising to many is not by much. Apple comes in at number 5 (Salesforce is #1), while Google is in the 7th slot.
According to a Fortune article today, Apple is indeed a bigger innovator than Google. But probably surprising to many is not by much. Apple comes in at number 5 (Salesforce is #1), while Google is in the 7th slot.
* The Innovation Premium is a measure of how much investors have bid up the stock price of a company above the value of its existing business based on expectations of future innovative results (new products, services and markets) . Members of the list must have $10 billion in market capitalization, spend at least 1% of their asset base on R&D and have seven years of public data
Well, that's an interesting metric for innovation. When Hindustan Unilever (wtf?) outranks Google you wonder the actual value of that metric for anything in particular. In fact a Forbes blog post questions this as well:
In any case, I question the OP's (stelligent) assertion that Google is really contributing THAT much to fundamental computer science relative to the size of the company and it's R&D budget. In fact the two examples he provides (BigTable and MapReduce) aren't fundamental science advances as much as good engineering to scale to larger data sets. BigTable is a fairly simple data model with a very robust implementation designed for scalability.
In terms of advancing the fundamental state of the art in data set design...meh. It's a multi-dimensional sorted map that holds blobs.
Good engineering and applied research is very useful and Google is very good at it. Scaling is very difficult but not a hard (in the classic computer science sense) problem.
MapReduce is more interesting to me as a general programming technique (generate an intermediate key/value pair to reduce map sizes...a useful technique for large data sets). But it's not a particularly novel or new approach...it is inspired by the map and reduce primitives from LISP. Again, awesome (software) engineering to help scale to larger data sets but not a fundamental advancement in computer science.
Arguably Apple's advances in UI is equally fluffy but IMHO it has more lasting real world impact over implementations to distribute a sorted map over a cluster or a distributed implementation of map and reduce from LISP.
Especially given that Google hasn't open sourced these implementations AFAIK. There are two open source BigTable projects but amusingly one is from Hadoop and backed by (now former) Yahoo engineers.
There's no reason to expect Google to open source key competitive advantages (their Google stack) except that they seem to expect others to give away their IP crown jewels without a fight.
My IP is my IP and your IP is my IP. That's a very freetard worldview which explains why Google remains a freetard tech darling and can do no wrong.
Comments
I have to admit that the fact that website even exists makes me laugh.
Well see there? You're feeling happier already.
Character for character is still prevented by copyright. The problem with patents is even if all the characters are different you still get sued.
Copyright doesn't merely extend to character for character copying. For instance, I couldn't write a book about a boy who grows up on a farm, wields a laser sword, wields a mystical form of magic, and flies spaceships around, all the while pursued by the villain who is secretly his father, and a dark magician who also wields an energy sword, could I? The dialogue could differ, the characters not identical, and certain plot elements changed, but it wouldn't really matter, would it?
In literature, you can't protect overall ideas or archetypes. Star Wars itself is based on a commonality of archetypes and legends familiar to many cultures. However, certain elements, when combined, are unique: the mysticism, energy swords, evil empire, space battles, etc.
You can't write a story featuring too much of a combination of those elements.
My point is, copyright is not limited to using the same words. It also covers expression. Otherwise, any wordsmith can say essentially the same thing but using different words and names.
Just like a skilled programmer can use a different method of coding to achieve essentially the same result. Software, like literature, is an expression of an idea. As long as it is specific, should it not enjoy the same protection afforded to literature?
Google is one of the most significant technology developer in the last while. Recent events and their own modus operandi obscure the facts that they make regular fundamental contributions to computer science, whereas Apple's innovation is at a less fundamental level (design, UI, integration, etc.). That's not to say Apple is less innovative. But Google's innovations are the stuff that moves computer science forward at a much lower level, and therefore have the potential to have a stronger and wider legacy.
According to a Fortune article today, Apple is indeed a bigger innovator than Google. But probably surprising to many is not by much. Apple comes in at number 5 (Salesforce is #1), while Google is in the 7th slot.
http://www.forbes.com/special-featur...companies.html
According to a Fortune article today, Apple is indeed a bigger innovator than Google. But probably surprising to many is not by much. Apple comes in at number 5 (Salesforce is #1), while Google is in the 7th slot.
http://www.forbes.com/special-featur...companies.html
* The Innovation Premium is a measure of how much investors have bid up the stock price of a company above the value of its existing business based on expectations of future innovative results (new products, services and markets) . Members of the list must have $10 billion in market capitalization, spend at least 1% of their asset base on R&D and have seven years of public data
Well, that's an interesting metric for innovation. When Hindustan Unilever (wtf?) outranks Google you wonder the actual value of that metric for anything in particular. In fact a Forbes blog post questions this as well:
http://blogs.forbes.com/haydnshaughn...paign=20110727
In any case, I question the OP's (stelligent) assertion that Google is really contributing THAT much to fundamental computer science relative to the size of the company and it's R&D budget. In fact the two examples he provides (BigTable and MapReduce) aren't fundamental science advances as much as good engineering to scale to larger data sets. BigTable is a fairly simple data model with a very robust implementation designed for scalability.
In terms of advancing the fundamental state of the art in data set design...meh. It's a multi-dimensional sorted map that holds blobs.
Good engineering and applied research is very useful and Google is very good at it. Scaling is very difficult but not a hard (in the classic computer science sense) problem.
MapReduce is more interesting to me as a general programming technique (generate an intermediate key/value pair to reduce map sizes...a useful technique for large data sets). But it's not a particularly novel or new approach...it is inspired by the map and reduce primitives from LISP. Again, awesome (software) engineering to help scale to larger data sets but not a fundamental advancement in computer science.
Arguably Apple's advances in UI is equally fluffy but IMHO it has more lasting real world impact over implementations to distribute a sorted map over a cluster or a distributed implementation of map and reduce from LISP.
Especially given that Google hasn't open sourced these implementations AFAIK. There are two open source BigTable projects but amusingly one is from Hadoop and backed by (now former) Yahoo engineers.
There's no reason to expect Google to open source key competitive advantages (their Google stack) except that they seem to expect others to give away their IP crown jewels without a fight.
My IP is my IP and your IP is my IP. That's a very freetard worldview which explains why Google remains a freetard tech darling and can do no wrong.