Back in 2001 some colleagues of mine and I designed and built a prototype for an electronic voting machine. Our design won an award. That’s as far as we went.
Recently, I noticed that the 2nd generation (or are they 3rd generation?) electronic voting machines bear a remarkable resemblance to the one we designed in the process that they use. They are much more secure and, importantly, auditable, which none of the machines of which, at the least, hundreds of thousands were sold in the aftermath of the 2000 election and its “dangling chads” are.
We should have patented it.
Why didn’t you attempt to commercialize it?
The government market is a very tough nut. It’s very difficult for startups to get a foothold. Also none of us were salesmen.
Yes the govt market is tough. But it’s accessible, unless the real issue is they didn’t want a solution.
I’d venture that under capitalization and salesmanship were the issues, but you could have hired sales. Too bad, sounds like a lost opportunity.
Talk patents. If Bill Gates’ father was not an attorney, would he have ever patented MSDOS? I think not.
Hmm. MS-DOS isn’t eligible for a software patent and, since it was originally QDOS, developed by Seattle Computing, any copyright would have belonged to SC.
And, of course, portions of QDOS were copied from CP/M, the IP of Digital Research Inc.
Software programs are very hard to patent and most copyrights are dubious. A friend of mine used to claim that there were very few original programs. Everything else is just a patch.