(Jay) wrote:

I think the Japanese have it figured out, they never try to license
any ideas, they just adopt other peoples, make incremental
improvements and sell goods. You want to get the technology, you're
going to have to try to reverse engineer it. Sure they get US
patents, but there are lots or ways to circumvent the disclosure
requirement without breaking the letter of the law.

I think your world is more like the Chinese software model. When I
lived there in the early 90's, it became VERY obvious that there was
virtually NO software industry in China. The software they did have
was hopelessly clunky and dated.

Why? Because anyone stupid enough to spend time developing it knew
they's sell about one copy of it before it ended up on every computer
in China. So why bother? They lived in your "perfect world", and the
end result was really, really bad software. Almost no one in a
country of over a billion people made their living writing software.

Mark Hickey