Open Sores

I’ll be at Interbike all next week, reducing Canootervalve to maybe the occasionally photo and half-formed musing–which I guess is pretty much what it is anyway.

But I’ll be neck-deep in bikes–literally and figuratively–so before all that starts I wanted to ponder the news today that Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak, wasn’t happy with the crushing pro-Apple verdict recently delivered in a patent lawsuit between Apple and Samsung. In case you hadn’t noticed, Apple literally own the ability to hinder sales of some Samsung phones because the Google Android OS on those phones encroached on Apple intellectual property. Heavy stuff, but bullshit, as far as Wozniak seems to be concerned.

Quoth Woz:

I hate it. I don’t think the decision of California will hold. And I don’t agree with it — very small things I don’t really call that innovative. I wish everybody would just agree to exchange all the patents and everybody can build the best forms they want to use everybody’s technologies.

In light of the recent Trek versus Weagle squabble the shareware, free love that Woz seems to be advocating here might sound pretty bizarre. Would we really just reduce things to their form factor, where the company with the best-looking bike always gets the sale.

Seems bold.

Apply it to the bike world and that means anyone could design a Santa Cruz VPP system or a DW-link. The invisible hand of the market would, presumably, mop up whatever confusion this nonsense would create and build, instead, better bikes–ones with more elegant solutions to the same set of problems.

Or people would just knock shit off poorly.

While I wish I could share in Woz’s Grand Open Source vision of a world in which intellectual property doesn’t have to matter so much, the reality is that we live in a world where companies rip off squiggly look of a Pinarello just to make a buck. And it works.

No, I think there’s still some value in intellectual property, but I’ll agree with Woz that a lot of it’s completely stupid, too. I’ve seen patents get slapped on “Brand A’s” single-pivot bikes because Brand B noticed a chance to patent something as stupid as a piece of tubing connecting the pivot and the shock mount. That’s so amazingly wrong on all levels.

So I’m off to the godforsaken desert. Any questions about new products, feel free to ask. Between all the meetings I definitely won’t get to everything, but that won’t stop me from trying.

Should come home just a little closer to creating some bicycles, too.