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\title{Invention vs. Incremental Improvements}
\author{Greg Hudson}
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The League paper has a section on the ``Overemphasis of Inventions,''
stating that ``most of the work in developing any useful software
system'' is in getting the details right, not in making new,
non-obvious inventions.  Heckel disagrees, noting that ``IBM is
reported to have spent 2.5 billion dollars to develop OS/2'' and
claiming that, ``Stallman would have no trouble making and
distributing a Unix clone'' were it not for intellectual property
rights and that ``product development effort seems to have focused on
creating many versions of an invention once its value was proven.''
Heckel makes many other statements implying that inventions (the
``card and rack'' metaphor, the concept of a spreadsheet, etc.) are
the most valuble feature of a software product, and that incremental
improvements are trivial.

I side with the League's argument on this issue, perhaps in part
because I come from the Unix systems programmings world (as does
Stallman) whereas Heckel comes from the personal computer applications
market.  Even in the PC software world, though, I will note that IBM's
OS/2 contained no fundamental innovations in operating system
technology, so the alleged 2.5 billion dollars went entirely into
making a product out of operating systems technology known long
before.  I also argue that the computer industry would be in rather
poor shape if we had to endure 17 years of one word processor, one
spreadsheet, and one database application because the ideas were
considered patentable inventions (and Heckel almost implies that Pardo
and Landau deserve a patent on spreadsheets).  Although the one
spreadsheet would certainly exploit the idea that an array of
equations is a useful programming model for business applications, it
would almost certain get a lot of details wrong (as most software
products do), and would be useless to many customers who find
spreadsheets useful today because of competition among vendors who
offer different sets of features--all of which are quite obvious, but
which take time and effort to get right.

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