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IBM's Supreme Court Brief Says That Patents Drive Free Software

Posted by timothy on from the corellation-is-not-causation dept.

H4x0r Jim Duggan writes "For the Supreme Court's upcoming review of the Bilski decision, IBM has submitted an amicus brief claiming that software patents 'fueled the explosive growth of open source software development' (!) (p38 of linked PDF). EndSoftwarePatents, for its own amicus brief, is looking for help building a list of free software harmed by software patents, and a list of companies that distribute free software and are taxed by patent royalties."

5 of 284 comments (clear)

  1. WTF IBM by Microlith · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Good to see that IBM has no clue what they're talking about. Patents most certainly have not fueled the explosive growth of open source software, the open nature of the licenses and community have. But go ahead and misrepresent the open source community IBM, for your own sake.

    Patents sit as an ever present threat that threatens to push development outside of software patent permitting countries, and makes software that is known to violate them into seriously gray territory. I also don't see how a patent, something with the sole purpose of denying use of the described mechanism to others, could possibly aid open source.

    1. Re:WTF IBM by camperdave · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Patents force people to work around patents.

      So a patent produces explosive growth in open source by encouraging the development of alternatives to what the patent covers? Nice. I think I'll use that line as a sig.

      --
      When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
    2. Re:WTF IBM by SanityInAnarchy · · Score: 4, Interesting

      We wouldn't have Vorbis if it weren't for the MP3 patents.

      No, but we'd have AAC, which is arguably just as good, maybe even better.

      And from what everyone is saying, Theora is far inferior to h.264. If patents weren't an issue, we'd all just declare mp4/m4v with h.264 and AAC as the new standard for the video tag, and there'd actually be cross-browser support.

      At the moment, because of real patents, Opera and Firefox won't support h.264 (and thus, youtube.com/html5), and because of imagined patents, Safari won't support vorbis. Thus, it's not just open source projects, but open standards, which are neutered by software patents.

      You may have a point with libpng, but then again, gif wasn't that bad. Indeed, gif supports things png doesn't -- animations, for one (there are two competing implementations, one of which has growing browser support (but nowhere near png), and one of which has practically no browser support.) I do prefer png, even with the gif patent expired, but at the end of the day, how big of an improvement was it?

      Patents force people to work around patents. It's economically inefficient (just as hurricanes fuel the construction industry) and therefore probably not desirable, but it really does happen.

      In other words, it's a broken window model.

      --
      Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
  2. Here's how it works: by Tablizer · · Score: 5, Interesting

    1. Stupid patents piss off techies
    2. Techies grow to despise corporate-produced software
    3. Techies motivated to make open-source variants to take sales away from evil corporations
    4. Profit! (Well, okay, I added this one out of habit.)

    --
    Table-ized A.I.
    1. Re:Here's how it works: by Verdatum · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I love this idea. I propose a new slogan: "IBM, we're dicks so the good-guys can one-up us."