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Torvalds Joins Anti-Patent Attack
canuck57 sent us a story about Linus
Torvalds has joined the chorus of voices speaking out against software patents. Talks briefly about the recent patent releases by IBM & Sun, and notes that there are 'an estimated 150,000 to 300,000 registered software patents in the U.S. alone.'
I really dont see what teh problem is: Patents server a purpose, to encourage innovation and to enable you ot I to profit from it. What's wrong with that?
I'd say any software patent is bad, simply because they're so ambiguous. It doesn't matter if the company in question is supposedly benevolent, or that they're not actively enforcing them: all it takes is a single lawyer with no scruples to cause a lot of pain. In any organization of significant size, you can rest assured they've got at least one bastardly lawyer.
Not only that, but there couldn't possibly be that many new, patentable techniques or technologies being discovered. Is it actually good practice to patent everything? While it might be "good" for open source with IBM supporting us and all, what's it do to the smaller companies that get (potentially) shafted by such absurdity? At the very least, it increases their cost of development due to necessary research.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
If this isn't the first time he's spoken out against them, then why is it news?
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Yeah, it's almost like the slashdot editors are allowed to voice their own views and not follow a company line set out by the people who own the site. Imagine that, editorial freedom in a news site! What a novel idea!
I'm really happy to see this article. I've had programming classes in college and you can be caught for cheating the same way software patents work, if you use the same method or logic to do something. People need to understand that when there's a better way of doing things, everyone should not be strangled for finding and using that method.
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I don't think we should be able to patent processes at all.
A process is the ultimate business advantage. If you can come up with it, you deserve to reap the rewards from using it. Not from selling it to or litigating against some other group.
This is where the system breaks down. Some things are not meant to be non-freely shared around society.
Patents should return to whence they came. Physical objects.
Copyrights should return to whence they came. Expression of ideas.
Processes are neither, and therefore shouldn't be covered by either.
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
I have to disagree somewhat.
I don't think we should be able to patent business processes or software processes at all. However manufacturing processes should be patentable.
I'll clarify that a little bit too. The process that should be patentable would be the process for say creating a specific alloy or chemical where it is not simple. Along the lines of non-obvious to someone in the field.
What shouldn't be patentable is the how do I assemble product X
Twenty years later, after a recent bumpy ride in the IT sector, investors (who generally understand little in terms of technoloy) would not invest unless they see there is some IP protection -- a.k.a. patents. Hence, the pressure for software patent legislation comming from companies that want to positively attract investor's attention. Big sharks such as M$ shouldn't really need software patents unless everybody else moves in that direction. They also probably learned a lot from big Pharma that patent everything they "discover" and then license those "discoveries" out to smaller companies. It's a different game these days, a different kind of race that, I'm afraid, the small fish (read: open-source developers) will unfortunately lose.
I think the problem isn't with software patents, it's more with the quite obvious things that we allow to be patented.
Free software is an awesome cause, but for those brilliant minds out there who put in months of work to come up with some new idea, there should be other options than to have to let someone else steal the idea or to keep it completely secret.
I think ideally we'd have a patent system that protected such inventions as RSA and MPEG compression, but recognized that one click billing is not patentable.
What makes spending years coming up with an algorithm that solves the problem of key distribution in encryption unpatentable, but somehow makes it okay to patent the plastic packaging for a razor blade?
No Further patents should be granted until the patent issues and problems are fully worked out and brought to acceptable terms to the entire American Public. This has gotten bad real bad...and it needs to be fixed.
Companies can still submit them for review they just need to realize that it might take 10 years beofre they are approved or rejected while the system gets properly reworked.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Part of the problem is that the US Patent Office has been lax in granting patents, said Mitchell Kapor, a founder of Lotus Development and a prominent backer of the Mozilla browser. "There have been tens of thousands of bad software patents issued which never would have been issued if the Patent Office had actually been following its own rules," he said.
...
The patent laws make some degree of sense. The patent office does not. The stuff they let through is totally unbelievable.
You can either wait to be hit with an infringement case (not a lot of fun) or you can submit a reexamination request to the PTO.
The worse thing you can do is to read the patents of your competition. Once you do that, you had better react quickly. Willful infringement in the US gets you treble damages.
What a wonderful world we live in
Where do you draw the line between hardware and software? Hypothetically, if software patents did not exist, could you implement in software a hardware patent to drive a custom built patent-free robot to create a piece of patented hardware?
Are there any ideas as to what is the theoretical difference between hardware and software?
If the difference is that hardware is or creates something physical and software is/does not, then couldn't I just easily port software algorithms into a mechanical device essentially allowing for a hardware patent?
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
There is, but it involves going to court.
But that is the big problem.
The whole patent system needs reforming. Patents are too easy to get, can be obtained for ideas that are trivial extensions of existing ideas (particularly in the software area)- and there's little or no downside to getting such a patent. So companies just play the percentages, get lots and lots of patents.
Meanwhile, individuals are rarely well advised to get patents- a patent is just a license to sue, but individuals often can't afford to sue anyway, so then the patent isn't worth the paper it is printed on.
There's also big problems with patents in that nobody really knows what a patent covers. Remember that patent that BT 'had' on the world wide web? It wasn't a slam dunk that they wouldn't win that one, it was close. Patents don't only cover the exact invention, they also cover similar inventions. And the web was sorta similar to their patent; but the court decided it was too far, in that case, a different court might have decided otherwise. That's what makes it all impossibly complex.
To make things worse, many software patents usually don't come with a useful description of how to actually do stuff, which is sad, since software can be documented by the sourcecode and printed.
That would be stupid- a patent application has to be written so that one 'skilled in the art' is able to reproduce the invention. Not doing that might well invalidate the patent.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"It's a common tactic of belittlement of your opponents - assume they are all one amorphous blob with a single hive mind, and then you can find them committing alleged hypocracy everywhere when they behave like what they really are - a bunch of individuals that only agree on a few things here and there.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
... neither of them even gets to finish their sentences! Are all American programs like this, or just Fox?
No, but it's the norm on "conservative" shows, radio or TV. I've listened to a lot of them, out of curiosity, and I've found that this is the main thing that stands out. If a guest or caller tries talking about something that doesn't fit the moderator's ideology, it had better be expressible in "bumper sticker" form, max 4 or 5 words. If the thought requires a complete, coherent English sentence to express, the speaker rarely gets a chance to complete it without being shouted down.
I think it's a cultural thing. In some circles, the standard is to let a guest express themselves, unless they get into hopeless rambling that nobody can follow. Then, after they've made some sort of coherent statement, you rip into them and tear their ideas apart.
In "conservative" circles, the standard is to listen only long enough to hear a few keywords, assume from those words whatever evil belief you'd like to attribute to the speaker, and drown them out with an attack on that. Then, when they try to object that that wasn't what they were trying to say, you do the same thing so they can't complete their explanation.
This doesn't work as well in a forum like slashdot, though some people can simulate it by quoting only a few of your words and replying to some random statement that contains those words.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.