HackNBlog @ Salamanteri Server

I recently bumped into an article about conference where the issue of software patent laws needing a reform was discussed. I will list Couple things to highlight I picke out of the text here. First:

A couple of scholars noted that large software firms, among others, publicly opposed software patents in the 1980s.

The most important and interesting part is about innovation. As you all know, or should know, the patent laws were designed to promote innovation, especially so that small people could publish their inventions without the fear of big ones coming to steal their idea and get all the money. Heres the piece I find “The Important” one when it comes to software patents:

Some of the harm from software patents is obvious. Do they provide any compensating benefit? There was little, if any, evidence that they encourage innovation. Although the number of software patents has exploded in recent years, one panelist expressed doubt that success in the technology area was associated with patent ownership. He observed that had the young Bill Gates been confronted at the outset with the litigation risks of tens of thousands of software patents, he might have chosen to exercise his entrepreneurial skills in a field other than software. The point, of course, is that the current system to some extent discourages innovation and entrepreneurship – a travesty of its intended purpose.

At a minimum, history suggests that patents are not a significant incentive to innovation in the software field. As I pointed out in my remarks at the conference, the Federal Circuit case law finding software to be patentable mostly dates from the mid-1990s, and the software patent explosion has occurred in the last ten years or so. However, a great deal of software now in everyday use was created earlier. Free and open source software programs such as GNU Emacs, GCC, and Linux date from the 1980s and early 1990s. Some of the most widely used proprietary software programs, like Lotus 1-2-3, Microsoft Word, and Oracle were released in the early 1980s. There’s no reason to think that the developers of those and other successful software programs would have been more innovative if they could have obtained patents.

So he patent system does not work when it comes to software patents. In fact it is, at worst, a huge danger to future innovations in software. Software patent system is wrong and again the FOSS ideology comes from quite the opposite camp than big companies which now support software patent system:

It is theoretically possible that some software developers today are motivated by the hope of a new patent, but the likelier impact of our current patent system is to distract developers with anxieties about being sued over preexisting patents. We know beyond question that the the incentives of the patent system are not encouraging free and open source software developers. A patent entitles the holder to exclude others from making, using, and selling an invention. FOSS developers don’t want to exclude others this way – they want to share their code – and so FOSS developers in principle have no interest in obtaining patents.

My suggestion: The patent system should be completely ditched when it comes to abstract software.

To read the original article, browse at article Brookings Conference on Software and Business Method Patents Highlights Need for Reform on red hat press site.

On the right is one of the wallpapers I found on Bablotech blogs article 12 Wallpapers in which linux criticizes windows. While I personally have little use for wallpapers, beeing user of Ion3 Window manager, I know that many visitors here might find these amusing :)

To quote osnews.com article Nokia To Add LGPL to Qt Licensing Model…

After Nokia purchsed Trolltech last year, doubts arose about how Nokia would handle the dual licensing model of Qt, the advanced cross-platform toolkit which lies at the base of the KDE Free software desktop. As it turns out, these doubts were unfounded, as Nokia today announced it’s going to add the LGPL to Qt’s licensing model, starting with Qt 4.5.

…and the press release…

The move to LGPL licensing will provide open source and commercial developers with more permissive licensing than GPL and so increase flexibility for developers. In addition, Qt source code repositories will be made publicly available and will encourage contributions from desktop and embedded developer communities. With these changes, developers will be able to actively drive the evolution of the Qt framework.

Personally I’m eager to see if this will result in code exchanging between the GTK and Qt projects - something that the licensing has prevented before. It would seem logical and beneficial to both sides to take on that path but only the future will tell…

Perhaps you, like many *nix users, like to remotely connect to your desktop and/or servers and thus are propably running an ssh-server. If so and you have ever checked logs for failed attempts to log in then you know that attempts to login with random usernames and passwords are made constantly. And finally, if you are like me, you are constantly worried that your username and the password, even though naturally a hard one to come up with, might one day be entered by person - or rather a brute force password cracking script - and thus your system getting compromized. There is a simple tool to deny hosts from connecting the ssh-server (couple tools even, but here is one) after failing defined number of times - and if configured to, the program will send email report of new denied hosts and suspicious connection attempts. denyhosts is the program I use for this, and here is how to set up it:

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