Software patents in Europe 1671
Mark, You did, in fact, point out many relevant, likely repercussions of swpats, and I did not intend to trivialize your comments. The...
So far, the replies to my original question in this thread tend to downplay the significance of software patents as a threat to the open source software movement. The responses range from (paraphrasing) "IBM and Novell will protect Linux" to "MS wouldn't dare" to "It'll get thrown out in court."
Well, I am not so sanguine. There is little reason to believe that IBM would protect an open source project that competed with their own technologies, be it a database (MySQL), a programming language (PHP) or other technology - of which they have plenty. IBM may protect Linux to some extent, but how many here are so naive as to believe that shelter under the wing of that old hawk would protect us little mice for long? Does anyone really believe that IBM would hesitate to find a way to put Linux in its own little prison, safely inside the IBM corporate campus?
It may be true that large numbers of patents are worthless and would be thrown out in court, but that buttumes that the defending party has the tens of thousands of dollars (hundreds of thousands? millions?) to launch an effective legal defense. How many open source projects do you know that have those resources? And who here thinks there are corporations around, who are so charitable as to pay $$$ like that to save your local o.s. community - be it PHP, Perl, Apache, mysql, oscommerce, or any other?
Perhaps they will. I don't know whether you mean to, but you come across as very aggressive. The sentence above is...
No. I do not believe open source can be anything like it is today, if software patents become a reality on the global scene. And, in case there is no one here who is watching, the future of swpats is being decided, as we speak, in Europe today. In the next 3 months, there will be a heated debate and a decision by the European Parliament that could well decide the fate of all we here care about in the way of software freedom.
I am amazed by the lack of attention this issue is receiving at this newsgroup.
On Wed, 09 Mar 2005 18:17:50 -0600, Liam Slider What we've had for the last several years is a recluctance on the part of large software corporations owning large patent portfolios to...