Compliance Toolkit

Story: Linus Torvalds speaks out against EU patent law

Posted by: Anonymous (Tuesday 23 November 2004, 10:19 PM)

Copyrights are adequate to protect the software you wrote from being used without your consent and without an agreed fee. If you have a business and you 'pirate' your copy of WindowsXP and the 'Business Software Consortium' find out, they will prosecute you and win. If you 'create' a program which uses Dynamically Linked Libraries from other programs and you do not have permission to use these libraries, you can be prosecuted and you will lose. In fact, 'copyright' will not be the only issue in cases such as these. The question now is: Of what value are software patents to the community and to an individual such as yourself? I can think of none; historically ideas are not patentable but their physical embodiments are. Software patents allow people to patent ideas. What's wrong with that? Well, can you imagine what would happen if arithmetic were patented? I'm sorry, you can't use the function 'X' for the next 17 years because I wrote about it.

Now, what other value can software patents have? Will you, Joe Schmoe, become a millionaire because you patented some bit of code which everyone will want to use? Dream on! The greatest benefit of the software industry is not in the sale of the software itself but in the services which grow around it. Why is IBM so interested in Linux? Why do they spend milliions each year promoting and developing it? So they can sell it? No! The money is in the services and that's what they concentrate on.

As mentioned by others, many people come up with the same idea and implement it in software - who should take credit for the software, the creators or the first person to the patent office? A lot of code must also be similar due to the mere fact that there are only so many efficient means of accomplishing a task and computer programmers have historically sought the 'best way'. Patents will mean that you must negotiate before writing code. Furthermore you must waste vast amounts of time and money researching every line of code you write because it may be patented. What a joke! Patents can only hinder software development and the large services sector built arouns software. This is not good for producers of software, it is very bad for the services industry because they too must produce software to improve interoperability and so on, and it is not good for the customer who has a problem that they need to solve quickly and with as little cost as possible.