HackNBlog @ Salamanteri Server

Thank god we dont have software patents here in Finland and hopefully we will never have. Hopefully…
Here’s a quote that I read on one blog:

Patent: Application-Specific Windows Colourisation
posted by Thom Holwerda on Mon 8th Sep 2008 23:23 UTC
IconThe US patent might be a bit daft, especially when it comes to software, but it does offer some interesting insights into what crazy things the big companies might be working on for future products. One such patent emerged today: Microsoft applied in 2005 (and was granted in 2008) a patent which describes how different windows may be coloured differently, or that they may have different transparency settings. This sounds a bit weird, but it may actually prove to be quite useful.

I wonder how is it possible that this feature in fact already DOES EXIST on at least one but propably in several window managers and desktop environments under *nix systems. In America you can get these silly patents called “software patents” that have very different purpose from the original idea of patents (which I then again do support) - but not only that: you can also get a patent for something that SOMEONE ELSE developed, released and has been around for years.

I don’t care - if any b-shit company ever comes to tell me that I break their patent to “creating shell scripts running under unix or unix-resembling systems” or something equally silly (and the fact is, many s-patents are way more ridiculous) I will tell them to stick their patents where the sun don’t shine - so that I wont have to.

Me is angry!

Author is a 29 years old linux zealot and hacker from Finland.

Tags: freedom, legal, Linux/Unix, Microsoft, Patents, rant

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 8th, 2008 at 2:28 pm and is filed under General Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.