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Story: Novell vows to use its patents to defend open-source

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Just wanted to point at a kwiki.ffii.org/Novell041012En commentary attributed to Hartmut Pilch from the FFII about these news.

I don't understand all this PR fireworks. The only way to defend free software (and non-free software) against software patents is keeping them illegal, or illegalising them were they exist. I mean all software patents not just one now and another one tomorrow.

All the giants together, IBM, Sun, HP, Novell, no matter who can do little to stop an individual with a solid software patent to harm free software significantly (likewise for non-free software). I don't care someone has written a patent application for a new, non-obvious and useful idea. If it is software, it's still no benefit to society to grant a monopoly to that idea, because it would have been independtly discovere sooner or later, and the monopoly will be on a necessarily broad abstraction, not a tecnical invention, so software patents should be (kept) banned. Patents are a legal regime that may be useful for some fields, but obviously not all.

Any pressure a company can do to illegalise or keep illegal all software patents, by political means, is helping free software against patents. Anything else is PR. PR has its merit too, but we shouldn't be fooled.

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