Re: OT: How I learned to stop worrying and love software patents
I wrote, in response to Prof. de Rezende:
> Yes, all very lovely, I've read Douglas Hofstadter's books too. ...
This was a cheap shot, and I'm ashamed to re-read it. I didn't mean
by this that Prof. de Rezende was not right to ground the "algorithms
are mathematics" perspective in the primary literature of computer
science, or even that it isn't more correct in a theory-of-knowledge
sense than other perspectives. It's just that I don't think this
calculus is helpful when interpreting a patent statute, because that
formal relationship is neither what the legislators had in mind nor
representative of the economics of the field.
In any case, Pedro didn't get those ideas secondhand from Douglas
Hofstadter, nor would they be any less valid if he had (I rather
enjoyed Hofstadter's books myself and appreciate his popularization of
topics that would perhaps otherwise be much less widely discussed
outside academia). It really wasn't nice of me to dismiss Pedro's
comments in those terms, and I apologize and ask his pardon.
Cheers,
- Michael
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