Re:So petty petty petty... (Score 2)

Drug companies gouge people, making enormous profits and driving people into bankrupcy with Federal- and charity funded research, while thousands die becuase they just can't afford the medication all over the world. Why not extend the concept of Open Source Software to other forms of technology. Within the music industry ( where the copyright systems used in the computer industry originated) any song\melody where the composer is more than 50 years dead is copyright free. It's still good music, and usually only the best tunes last that long. You don't have to pay to use it, though citing the author is only seen as good manners. There is a lot of good uncopyrighted music on the net. Scientific papers are released into the public domain. This is positively encouraged as it allows the authors to get the brownie points necessary to get more funding. If we as taxpayers are funding the research, then why shouldn't we have access to the fruits of that research. A good lawyer could devise an equivalent license for open source patents, where anyone wishing to use the technology covered by that patent would pay a fee to the patent originator, until the research costs + 10% were recouped. After this the technology would be free to use. This would allow manufacturers of generic drugs to help fund research.This would allow research bodies to recoup their costs more quickly and would cause the price of the medicines to drop world-wide. It would take an international organisation to run this sort of thing. But the long-term effect of increasing the amount of technology available to everybody would be to accelarate the amount of research that is being done. You could extend the idea to all forms of technology. Why should the Open Source ethic be limited to computer software?