[ox-en] patents
- From: Graham Seaman <graham seul.org>
- Date: Fri, 15 Feb 2002 05:18:13 -0500 (EST)
This kind of thing is driving me nuts:
"Stallman's 75 minute-long speech captivated the 500-strong audience. It
mostly laid out his well-known views on why patents are inappropriate
to software. Software design, he said, is fundamentally different from
tangible physical design, which he agreed should be patentable."
Free software people (including Stallman) keep saying, 'yes of course we
support free hardware design too'; then as soon as the question of
software patents comes up, their answer 'software patents are bad but
patents for everything else are good'. But patents are the main problem
for free hardware design. Just at the moment there's this:
http://www.opencores.org/2nd_mips_letter.pdf
(which reads as if it's about trade marks, but buried in the middle is a
claim about patent law which would pretty much kill all free hardware
design).
If you're a free software person arguing about software patents, please,
don't just dismiss the problems of patents in every other area and say
'of course they're ok everywhere else but software' - just say 'I'm only
concerned with patents in software'!
Graham
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