Compliance Toolkit

Story: The patent poison spreads

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I agree with the first comment: it's well known that the only way to make money from software is by selling it as a shrink-wrapped product in the high street or as part of a mobile phone. It's hard to write the stuff too and it takes a long time so the market would be much better served if proprietary software developers could just take the free stuff written by those dirty hippy Communists - they obviously don't understand what copyright is for anyway. The way things are now though - actually being *forced* by these FSF thugs to 'GPL' everything we write or end up at the bottom of the river - well that's really just intolerable. I can't get any work done for worrying that maybe the next time the doorbell rings it'll be a visit from Moglen or Welte.

Hopefully software patents will help save us from this internet enabled dystopia of confusingly diverse and innovative software, unlicensed ideas flying around unprotected all over the place, disruptively competetive SMEs and irresponsible individuals who think they can just use their own computers without regard for the needs of the multi-national hardware manufacturers, patent attorneys and IP companies. The foundations of the free market are severely undermined by all this errm... freedom and it must be stopped. The great economist and philosopher Emmanuel Goldstein has written a book: "The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism", describing how the free market is really supposed to work and which I think ZDNet UK journalists and editors would do well to study.

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