[ANSOL-geral]Knuth, patentes

[J M Cerqueira Esteves]

Para quem está a organizar dossiers, pode interessar o bocado em que o
Knuth fala de patentes, na lecture "All questions answered" em Munique,
5 de Outubro de 2001 [Notices of the AMS 49 (3),
http://www.ams.org/notices/200203/fea-knuth.pdf ]
[referido no Slashdot, 
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/03/17/0054213&mode=thread&tid=156 ].

Citando parte:

      Question: What is your thinking about software patents? There is a
   big discussion going on in Europe right now about whether software
   should be patentable.
   
      Knuth: I'm against patents on things that any student should be
   expected to discover. There have been an awful lot of software patents
   in the U.S. for ideas that are completely trivial, and that bothers me
   a lot. There is an organization that has worked for many years to make
   patents on all the remaining trivial ideas and then make these
   available to everyone.  The way patenting had been going was
   threatening to make the software industry stand still.
   
      Algorithms are inherently mathematical things that should be as un-
   patentable as the value of Pi.  But for something nontrivial, something
   like the interior point method for linear programming, there's more
   justification for somebody getting a right to license the method for a
   short time, instead of keeping it a trade secret.  That's the whole
   idea of patents; the word patent means "to make public".
   
      I was trained in the culture of mathematics, so I'm not used to
   charging people a penny every time they use a theorem I proved. But I
   charge somebody for the time I spend telling them which theorem to
   apply.  It's okay to charge for services and customization and
   improvement, but don't make the algorithms themselves proprietary.


O problema é os destinatários terem alguma noção de quem se cita
[convém despejar ao lado tudo o que forem honrarias sonantes
atribuídas à pessoa, mas com o Knuth disso também não falta...  Por
outro lado a medalha Fields pode ser pouco conhecida em S. Bento].

Ministro|secretário de estado|deputado:

"Deixa ver o que estes querem... Ah, é daquilo das patentes, aquela
 coisa que o Fagundes disse que temos de despachar quanto antes para
 não fazer má figura em Bruxelas.  Mas quem é este Knuth?
 Algoritmos, teoremas... Que raio, não percebo nada disto. 
 É quase sexta-feira, e tenho é de me despachar com os desígnios nacionais
 antes que o presidente mande outra indirecta.

 --- Ó Gracinda, traga-me depressa os dossiers da UEFA e do Grupo Amorim!"