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.

I bumped into heart warming article, File your open source code with Linux Defenders, at zdnet.com’s blog site. To put it out in sort, the article advices to file your OSS source code at LinuxDefenders.org “to prove your authorship of open source code and protect it from patent trolls” - an important step bacause otherwise your great application may, in future, become illegal in some of the silly countries where software can be given patents (even if those filing the patent were not the inventors if they are first to file). Even worse, if you live in country that recognives software patents you may be in big trouble.
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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!