2010-01-14

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: