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.

Tags: freedom, GPL, legal, Linux/Unix Software, Open Source, Patents, rant, Red Hat

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 31st, 2009 at 4:29 am 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.