Re: [TRAD GNU] stallman-mec-india - 3e morceau

[Therese Godefroy <godef.th AT free.fr>]

# SOME DESCRIPTIVE TITLE
# Copyright (C) YEAR Free Software Foundation, Inc.
# This file is distributed under the same license as the PACKAGE package.
# FIRST AUTHOR <EMAIL@ADDRESS>, YEAR.
#
msgid ""
msgstr ""
"Project-Id-Version: PACKAGE VERSION\n"
"POT-Creation-Date: 2011-07-14 04:30-0300\n"
"PO-Revision-Date: 2011-07-27 09:31+0100\n"
"Last-Translator: Therese <godef.th AT free.fr>\n"
"Language-Team: LANGUAGE <LL AT li.org>\n"
"MIME-Version: 1.0\n"
"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8\n"
"Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n"

#. type: Content of: <p id="conf11">
msgid "<strong>L'invention logicielle n'a pas les contraintes pratiques de l'invention matérielle</strong>"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <p>
msgid "Now, people sometimes ask me why is software different from other fields.  Sometimes, of course they ask this in a rather nasty fashion, they say the other fields can deal with patents why should software be an exception? Now that's a nasty way of putting it because its making the assumption that it is wrong to want to escape from a problem.  I could imagine I am saying when other people could get cancer, why shouldn't you? Clearly, if it is a problem, enabling any field to escape is good.  But it is a good and serious question &ldquo;are these fields in the same issue&rdquo;? The patents affect all these fields the same way? Is the right policy for the software the same as the right policy for automobile engines or pharmaceuticals or chemical processes, you know, this is a serious question which is worth looking at.  When you look at it, what you see is that the relationship between patents and products varies between the fields."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <p>
msgid "At one extreme you have pharmaceuticals were typically a whole chemical formula is patented.  So if you come up with a new drug then its not patented by somebody else.  At the other extreme is software were when you write a new program, you are combining dozens or hundreds of ideas and we can't expect them all to be new.  Even in an innovative program which has the few new ideas has to use lots and lots of old ideas too.  And in between you find the other fields.  Even in other fields, you can get patent deadlocks."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <p>
msgid "When the United States entered the World War I, nobody in the US could make a modern airplane.  And the reason was that modern airplanes use several different techniques that were patented by different companies and the owners hated each other.  So nobody could get a license to use all these patents.  Well, the US Government decided that this was an unacceptable state of affairs and essentially, paid those patent holders a lump sum and said we have nationalized these patents and now everybody go make airplanes for us.  But the amount to which this happens, the frequency and the seriousness of it varies according to how many different ideas go in one product.  It varies according to how many points of patent vulnerability there are in one product.  And in that question, software is at the extreme."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <p>
msgid "It's not unusual of for a few people working for a couple of years to write a program that could have a million parts in it, different parts which is maybe, say 300,000 lines of code.  To design a physical system that has a million different parts, that's a major project, that's very rare.  Now you find many times people make a physical object with a million parts, but its typically many copies of the same subunit and that's much easier to design &mdash; that's not a million parts in the design.  Now, so, why is this?"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <p>
msgid "The reason is that in other fields people have to deal with the propensity of matter.  When you are designing circuits or cars or chemicals, you have to face the fact that these physical substances will do what they do, not what they are supposed to do.  We in software don't have that problem and that makes it tremendously easier.  We are designing a collection of idealized mathematical parts which have definitions.  They do exactly what they are defined to do."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <p>
msgid "And so there are many problems we don't have.  For instance, if we put an if statement inside a while statement, we don't have to worry about whether the if statement can get enough power to run at the speed its going to run.  We don't have to worry about whether it would run at a speed that would generates radio frequency interference in it and induces wrong values in some other parts of the data.  We don't have to worry about whether it would loop at a speed that causes resonance and eventually the if statement will vibrate against the while statement and one of them will crack.  We don't have to worry that chemicals in the environment will get into the boundary between the if statement and the while statement and corrode them and cause a bad connection."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <p>
msgid "We don't have to worry other chemicals would get on them and cause short-circuit.  We don't have to worry about whether the heat can be dissipated from the if statement through the surrounding while statement.  We don't have to worry about whether the while statement would cause so much of voltage drop and the if statement so that the if statement won't function correctly.  When you look at the value of a variable you don't have to worry about whether you've referenced that variable so many times that you exceed the fan out limit.  You don't have to worry about how much capacitance there is in a certain variable and how much time it will take to store the value in it."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <p>
msgid "All these things are defined a way and the system is defined to function in a certain way and it always does.  The physical computer might not function, but that's not the programs fault.  So because of all these problems we don't have to deal with, our field is tremendously easier.  If you assume that the intelligence of programmers is the same as the intelligence of mechanical engineers, electrical engineers and chemical engineers and so on, what's going to happen.  Those of us with the easiest field, fundamentally, are going to push it further.  We make bigger and bigger the things and eventually it becomes hard again."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <p>
msgid "And that's why we can develop much bigger systems than people in the other fields.  They just have these hard problems to deal with all the time."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <p>
msgid "In the other fields, it may be necessary to develop an idea, you may have the idea but then you may have to try out lots of different ways to get it work at all.  In software now, like that, you have the idea and what you go and do is write a program which uses this idea and then the users may like it or not.  And if they don't like it, probably you can just fix some details and get it to work.  There is another problem that we don't have to worry about &mdash; manufacturing of copies."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <p>
msgid "Well, when we put the if statement inside the while statement, we don't have to worry about how the if statement is going to be inserted into the while statement as a copy is being built.  We don't have to worry either about making sure we have access to remove and replace the if statement if it should burn out.  So all we have to do is take copy in its all purpose copy anything facility.  People making physical recruitment and physical products they can do that these things has to be built piece by piece each time.  The result is that for them, the cost of designing a system of certain complexity may be (gesturing) this much and the factory may take this much to set up.  So they have to deal with this much with the patent system, it's a level of overhead they can live with."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <p>
msgid "For us, designing it may cost (gesturing) this much and manufacturing it may cost this much, so this much overhead from the patent system is crushing.  Another way to look at it is that because we can, a few of us can, make a much bigger system, there are many more points of vulnerability where somebody might have patented something already."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <p>
msgid "We have to walk a long distance through the mine field where they they only have to walk a few feet through the minefield.  So its much more of a dangerous system for us.  Now, you have to realize that the extensible purpose of the patent system is to promote progress.  This is something that is often forgotten because the companies that benefit from patents like to distract you from it.  They like to give you the idea that patents exist because they deserves special treatment.  But this is not what the patent system says."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <p id="conf12">
msgid "<strong>L'invention logicielle est freinée par les brevets</strong>"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <p>
msgid "Patent system says, the goal is to promote progress for the society.  By encouraging certain behavior like publishing new ideas and after certain &mdash; originally that was fairly short &mdash; time, everyone could use them.  Of course there is a certain price that the society pays as well and we have to ask the question which is bigger &mdash; the benefit or the price.  Well, in other fields, I am not sure.  I am not an expert on other fields of engineering, I've never done them and I don't know whether having patents is good for progress in those fields."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <p>
msgid "I have been in software since before software patents existed and I know that software patents do a lot of harm and essentially no good.  In the old days, ideas came along, either people in a university had an idea or somebody had an idea what he was working on developing a software.  And either way, these ideas got published and then everyone could use them.  Now why did the software publishers publish these ideas? Because they knew that the big job was writing the program."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <p>
msgid "They knew that publishing the ideas would get them credit from the community and meanwhile anybody else who wanted to compete with them would still have to write a program, which is the big job.  So they typically kept the details of the program secret, of course some of us think that it is wrong, but that is a different issue they kept the details of the program secret and they publish the ideas and meanwhile the software development because software development is going on that provided the field with a steady stream of ideas so ideas were not the limiting factor."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <p>
msgid "The Limiting factor was the job of writing programs that would work and that people would like using.  So, in effect, applying the patent system to software focuses on facilitating a thing which is not the limiting factor while causing trouble for the thing which is the limiting factor.  You see the software patents encourage somebody to have an idea but at the same time they encourage people to restrict its use, so in fact we are actually worse off now in terms of having ideas we could use, because in the past people have the ideas and publish them and we could use them and now they have the ideas and patented them and we can't use them for twenty years."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <p>
msgid "In the mean time, the real limiting factor &mdash; which is developing the programs &mdash; this is hampered by software patents because of other dangers I explained to you in the first half of this talk.  So the result is that while the system is supposed to be promoting progress in software actually it is so screwed up its just obstructing progress."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <p>
msgid "Today we have some economic research showing Mathematically how this can happen.  You can find it in www.researchoninnovation.org and I am not completely sure of the name of the paper, but its one that shows that in a field where incremental innovation is typical.  Having a patent system can result in slower progress.  In other words the system produces counter intuitive results that are the opposite of what it was intended to do.  This backs up the intuitive conclusion of every programmer who sees that software patents are absurd."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <p id="conf13">
msgid "<strong>Certains brevets couvrant à la fois du logiciel et du matériel sont acceptables</strong>"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <p>
msgid "So, what can a country do to avoid this problem? Well, there are two approaches, one is to address the problem at the issue of granting patents, and the other is to approach it at the point where the patents are being enforced.  Doing this at the stage of granting patents is not quite as easy as you might think, now I have been talking about software patents but strictly speaking you can't classify patents into hardware patents and software patents because one patent might cover both hardware and software so in fact my definition of a software patent is a patent that can restrict software development.  And if you look at many software patents you can often find that the system may describe has a large part of the computer itself as a part of the description of what's going on, that's a great way of making the whole thing seem complicated when it is really trivial.  So its the way they can get the patent office to decide it is unobvious.  But there is a different criterion that can be used, a slightly different place to draw the line that still does a reasonable job and that is between processes that transforms matter in a specific way and processes where the result is just calculation and display of information or a combination of data processing and display steps where others are put it as mental steps being carried out by equipment."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <p>
msgid "There are various ways of formulating this, but more or less equivalent.  Now this is not exactly the same as prohibiting software patents, because in some cases computers are used as a part of specific physical equipment to make it do a specific thing.  And software patents might be allowed if they are part of a specific physical activity.  But that's not really a disaster, after all once people are involved in a specific physical activity or a specific physical product, they are bringing into their home business all those complexities of dealing with matter.  So its more like those other fields of engineering, may be its okay to have patents on that narrow kind of software."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <p>
msgid "As long as we can keep the core areas of the software, the purely software activities safe from patents we have solved the bulk of the problem.  So that is a feasible approach and that's what people are working towards in Europe.  However that is not going to be any use in the United States because United States already has tens of thousands and probably hundreds of thousands of software patents.  Any change in the criterion for issuing patents does not help at all with the patents that already exists."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <p id="conf14">
msgid "<strong>Les brevets purement logiciels doivent être abolis ou refusés partout dans le monde</strong>"
msgstr "<strong>Les brevets purement logiciels doivent être abolis ou refusés partout dans le monde</strong>"

#. type: Content of: <p>
msgid "So what I propose to the United States is to change the criteria for applying patents to say that purely software systems running on general purpose computing hardware are immune from patents.  They by definition cannot infringe a patent and this way patents can still be granted exactly the way they are now and they can still in the formal sense cover both hardware implementations and software implementations as they do now.  But software would be safe."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <p>
msgid "That's the solution I propose to the US, but it could be used in other countries as well.  Now, one of the tremendous dangers facing most countries today is the World Trade Organization, which sets up a system of corporate regulated trade &mdash; not free trade as its proponents like to call it, but corporate regulated trade.  It replaces regulation of trade by governments that are somewhat democratic and might listen to the interest of their citizens with regulation of trade by businesses which don't pretend to listen to the citizens.  So it is fundamentally antidemocratic and ought to be abolished."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <p>
msgid "But it is crucial to note that the part of the GATT agreement which deals with patents does not require software patents.  Many experts who have studied this in Europe makes this claim and the reason is that they interpret technical affect as there is a specific physical consequences for physical system going on.  And the software vector doesn't do that, doesn't have to be, in the domains that the patents can cover.  So at least you don't have to worry about the Word Trade Organization causing problems here despite the tremendous problems they cause in other areas of life."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <p>
msgid "Preventing India from software patents here will be up to you &mdash; to the citizens of India.  I am a foreigner, I have no influence except when I can convince other people through the logic of what I say.  There is a chance that you can do this.  When US started to have software patents the public policy question was not considered at all.  Nobody even asked whether it was a good idea to have software patents.  The Supreme Court made a decision which was then twisted around by an appeals court and ever since then there was software patents."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <p>
msgid "But when Europe started to consider officially authorizing software patents a few years ago, public opposition started to rise and became so strong that the politicians and the parties began paying attention to it.  And started saying that they were against it.  In fact two attempts to authorize software patents have been blocked already in Europe.  The French Minister of Industry says that the software patents would be a disaster and under no circumstances should they be allowed in France.  Over the German political parties have taken a stand against the software patents."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <p>
msgid "The battle is not yet over, you know, we have not conclusively blocked software patents in Europe because the multinational companies and their servant, the United States government, is lobbying very hard and they have ignorance on their side it is so easy for somebody with a naive near-liberal view to be persuaded that new kind of monopoly has to be good."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <p>
msgid "You have to look at the details of how software patents affect software development to see that they cause problem.  You have to study that economic research in its Mathematics in order to see why you shouldn't assume that patents always promote progress.  So it is easy for IBM to centre someone and say you should really adopt software patents, they are great for programming and look US is ahead in when US has software patents if you have software patents too you might catch up.  You can get more dominant and &mdash; when US was ahead in computers before it had software patents, it can't be because of software patents.  It is important to understand that each country has its own patent systems and its own patent laws and what you do in a certain country under the jurisdiction of that country's patent law.  So the result is that if the US has software patents the US becomes a sort of battleground where anybody using computer might get sued."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <p>
msgid "If India avoid software patents then India is not a battleground, and computer users in India do not face this danger of getting sued.  So it turns out that each country will issue patents to foreigners just as to its own citizens.  So in fact in a place which has this idea of software patents foreigners can own those patents there are lots of non-US companies that own US software patents so they all welcome to get involved in the fighting in the US.  Of course is we Americans to suffer become the victims of this.  Meanwhile in India if there are no software patents that means Indian companies and foreign companies are prevented from coming to India and attacking people with software patents."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <p>
msgid "So, yes it is important that each countries has its own patents for that makes big difference but you can't understand what difference it makes.  Having software patents in a certain country is not an advantage for developers in that country.  It is a problem for anybody distributing and using software in that country.  Now, if you in India are developing a program for use in US you may face the problem or your client may face the problem of US software patents.  At least probably you can get sued here."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <p>
msgid "The client who commissioned the program and tried to use it might get sued in the US and indeed you will have to deal with the problem, the US is problem when you try doing business in the US.  But at least you will be safe here you know at least it is a big difference between your client got sued because your client told you to make a product and that product is patented versus you get sued for making that product."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <p>
msgid "If there are software patents in India you will get sued.  Wheas in the current situation at least you can say to the client &ldquo;well, we did our job you told us to make this and we made it and so, I am sorry this happened to you but this is not our fault&rdquo;.  If there are software patents in India you get sued yourself and there is nothing you can say about that."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <p>
msgid "So the ultimate conclusion is that software patents tie all software developers, all computer users and essentially all businesses in new kind of bureaucracy which serves no beneficial social purpose.  So that is a bad policy and it should be avoided.  Businesses don't like bureaucracy.  If businesses knew that they were threatened with a new kind of bureaucracy they would have opposed software patents very strongly.  But most of them aren't aware of this."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <p>
msgid "In the US software patents have led directly to business method patents.  What does this mean? A business method is basically haw you make decisions about what to do in the business.  And in the past these decisions were made by humans but now sometimes they are made by computers and that means they are carried out by software and that means decision policies can be patented.  So software patents implied business method patents and business procedure patents.  So the result is that any business could find itself, you know, once they decide &ldquo;we're going to automate the way we carry out our procedures&rdquo; but now they can get sued with software patents.  So if the businesses only knew they would be organizing through things like the chamber of commerce to demand opposition to software patents."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <p>
msgid "But most of them don't know and therefore it is going to be your job to inform them.  Make sure that they understand the danger that they are facing.  And then India may be able with the help from other countries like France and Germany to reject software patents.  It is important for the people in the Indian Government to make contact with officials in European countries so that this battle against software patents doesn't have to be fought at one country at a time, countries can work together to adopt an intelligent policy.  May be there should be a no software patents treaty that various countries can sign and promise each other aid when they are threatened by economic pressure from the United States as part of its economic imperialism."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <p>
msgid "Because United States likes to do that, you know, one of the provisions in the GATT agreement is that the countries have the right to make compulsory licenses for making medicines to address a public health crisis.  And the South African Government proposed to do this for medicine against AIDS.  South Africa has a very bad problem with AIDS the figures I heard was that a quarter of the adult population is infected.  And of course, most of them can't afford to buy these medicines at the prices charged by the US companies."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <p>
msgid "So the South African Government was going to issue compulsory license which even under GATT is allowed to do, but US Government threatened economic sanctions.  Vice President Gore was directly involved with this and then he'd be facing the presidential election he realized that this was going to look bad and so he dropped out of the effort.  But this kind of the thing is what the US Government does all the time with regard to patents and copyrights.  They only mind if people get patented to death.  So it is important for countries to work together against this."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <p>
msgid "For more information about the problems of software patents see www.progfree.org and www.ffii.org.  And there is also a petition to sign, www.knowepatents.org."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <p>
msgid "Please talk with all executives of businesses &mdash; any kind of businesses &mdash; about this issue.  Make sure that they understand the extend of the problem they face and they think of going to business organizations to have them lobby against software patents."
msgstr ""