Thanks to John von Neumann for free computer.
Evel genius John von Neumann (he is one of creators of nuclear bomb and
the only one who be pride with this, think nice that his bomb kills
people at Hiroshima and Nagasaki) make computer world free.
See what say GNU's Bulletin, vol. 1 no. 12:
The biography, John von Neumann and the Origins of Modern
Computing (by William Asprey, MIT Press, 1990, pp. 41-45),
describes a patent dispute in 1946-47 that Von Neumann had with
Eckert and Mauchly over the EDVAC. Von Neumann had been a
consultant to the EDVAC project and had contributed to many of
the fundamental inventions there. In 1946, Eckert and Mauchly
attempted to patent much of the EDVAC technology, including that
which von Neumann claimed he had invented.
The fight ended when a draft report on EDVAC that von Neumann had
written in 1945 was held to be a prior publication. Thus, all of
the inventions in question became part of the public domain.
One result of this dispute was that von Neumann changed the
patent policy for his computer project at the Institute for
Advanced Studies. The original plan was to have patents assigned
to individual engineers. Instead, all ideas were placed in the
public domain.
Von Neumann said "This meant, of course, that the situation had
taken a turn which is very favorable for us, since we are hardly
interested in exclusive patents, but rather in seeing that
anything that we contributed to the subject ... remains as
accessible as possible to the general public."
See also:
Posted by
gavenkoa
