Re: Negotiating for using Royalty Free patents

[jamie <jamiemcc blueyonder co uk>]

On Mon, 2004-04-12 at 09:59, Rui Miguel Seabra wrote:
> On Sun, 2004-04-11 at 15:54 -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > If you really want to address patents, what we need is to be patenting
> > everything we do under open-source-only terms. That would be a great
> > thing for some open source related foundation to undertake.
> 
> Not only it wouldn't be a great thing (software patents are bad, period)
> but also it wold require a foundation with funds comparable to those of
> Microsoft's cash reserves, and then some, so it is not feasible.

Patents are only worthwhile if they neutralise other patents. IE if we
designed an open source patent system which allows unrestricted use in
open source projects but closed source/ commercial are only allowed to
use them if they legally agree never to sue all open source projects for
patent infringement. That way if we hook Apple and MS we can then use
all their patents without risk. This viral effect would hopefully go
some way to sabotaging the entire software patent system.

The problems with patents is that no one can publicly discuss an idea
prior to patenting otherwise it loses all rights so it would require
extensive organisation (filtering out only the good ideas that are worth
patenting and hence it should be affordable for some organisation to
manage).

> 
> BTW, I see few gnome related sites closed down in protest against
> software patentes
> 
> http://demo.ffii.org/inserturl.php
> 
> and there's no news about gnome officially doing something, even though
> it was asked in the foundation list

The European patents thing is mostly FUD put out by FFII. Patenting of
pure software methods and business methods are not on the agenda (the
MEPs have made it abundantly clear that they wont allow this ever). The
only thing that anyone is proposing is allowing software patents in
embedded devices like the firmware in telecommunication equipment.
Whilst I would prefer a blanket ban on all software patents, these
proposals are more or less harmless.

jamie.

> 
> http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2004-April/msg00000.html
> 
> Hugs, Rui