Time To Abolish Software Patents?

Posted by Soulskill on Friday February 29, 2008 @01:15AM from the reply-hazy-try-again dept.

gnujoshua writes "Has the time come to abolish software patents? Fortune columnist Roger Parloff reports on a new campaign called End Software Patents, which he views as 'attempting to ride a wave of corporate and judicial disenchantment with aspects of the current patent system.' Ryan Paul of Ars Technica writes that the purpose of the campaign is to 'educate the public and encourage grass-roots patent reform activism in order to promote effective legislative solutions to the software patent problem.' The campaign site is informative and targets many types of readers, and it includes a scholarship contest with a top prize of $10,000.00. We've recently discussed the potential legal re-examination of software patents."

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Re:copyright too.. by harry666t · 2008-02-29 01:52 · Score: 5, Informative

1. software patents != copyright

2. abolishing COPYRIGHT, not PATENTS, would eventually mean that ALL the software will fall under a BSD-style license, which not only means free (but without copyleft ;/) but also means you can do whatever the fuck you want to to ANY piece of program in the world, including reverse engineering the hell out of anything, installing OS X on a non-Apple toaster, freely mixing Linux and leaked windows code, and so on. I would see it as a benefit. The OSS community and the open source / free software model is too powerful for any closed-source corporation (but maybe one) to stop, so simply forking a project and closing the source will mean the fork will die soon.

3. Abolishing copyright won't happen any time soon. *Maybe* if Stallman becomes the president.