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Software Patents Good For Open Source?
schliz writes "The Australian software patent system could be used by open source developers to ensure their inventions remain available to the community, a conference organized by intellectual property authority IP Australia heard this week According to Australian inventor Ric Richardson, whose company came out on top of a multi-million dollar settlement with Microsoft in March, a world without software patents would be 'open slather for anybody who can just go faster than the next person.' Software developer Ben Sturmfels, whose 2010 anti-software-patent petition won the support of open source community members such as Jonathan Oxer, Andrew Tridgell, and software freedom activist Richard Stallman, disagreed."
The core of the summary is this:
What a joke! Let me guess, Bates wants people to pay him to check patent applications for OSS. Prior art invalidates a patent. Simply publishing or releasing your software open source makes it prior art therefore preventing someone from claiming an "inventive step" - the usual requirement for a patent. Save your money.
Stallman may disagree, but he has shown the world how to write a "free" software license GPL3 that's so restrictive nobody in industry wants to use it.
Stallman's not a gawd. He has come up with some brilliant ideas. No, I don't agree with him on most things (especially politics), but wrt proprietary protocols, he's bang on! Lawyers and tort law flaws are destroying the US. RMS is the bleeding edge of reform of both. He points the way that you ought to go.
I don't care what he smells like or what he has between his toes. On the things he cares about, usually he's right. He's Arisotelian ("things as they could, and should, be"), which is all I ask of anybody. YMMV, and if so you suck, IMO.
Rock on Richard. Give 'em hell. No, I won't vote for you. I will follow you.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
Stallman may disagree, but he has shown the world how to write a "free" software license GPL3 that's so restrictive nobody in industry wants to use it.
You misunderstand the purpose of the GPL (and I did too until recently). GPL exists to make the software free. Something like BSD is meant to make the people free. Different licenses for different purposes.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The problem, as usual, is not with the technicals, but with the business.
Software Patents solve a business need; that of investors to feel reassured that the thing they're investing in is worth the investment they're making.
An investor usually has no technical chops, so cannot determine if a software startup is doing something clever, innovative or hard-to-replicate. They're buying a stake in some Intellectual Property, and need to know that the property they're buying is 'real'. The first question asked of a software startup is 'what's your protection strategy for your IP?', because if there's no protection there's nothing 'real' that they can invest in. Patents are currently a good answer to this question.
This view is changing, slowly. Lean Startup http://theleanstartup.com/ (amongst others) is beginning to get people used to the concept that execution is more important than ideas, that IP is not a static thing that remains constant and can be owned like a piece of land. A business's IP should be changing the whole time, old ideas and executions discarded behind it as they become irrelevant in a changing market, new executions being constantly tested against the current market.
With this worldview, investors invest in people, not ideas, and the whole patent system becomes irrelevant.
Of course, as long as there's a valid business model for patent trolling then there'll be a set of businesses using that model to make money. But it becomes more and more visibly broken and hopefully we can get the politicians to see that.
Business/App ideas are like arseholes: everyone's got one, they're mostly shit, but very rarely they contain a diamond