Software Patents – RMS

What do you think of patents? via Aaron Lin…

We found another algorithm that nobody had patented yet. So everyone stopped using Compress and started using Gzip, right? No. Because the same compression is used in GIF … it’s called PNG format, which I believe means PNG’s Not Gif. … The people who use PNG format don’t start out looking for a patented format. … It took years for the web browsers to support PNG at all. The browsers won’t display this format, so how can we use it? … Some of them are officially published by a standards committee. Many of them are covered by software patents. … Now this is not supposed to happen. The patent office isn’t supposed to offer two patents on the same thing. … It’s hard to understand what a software patent covers, because it’s just mathematics really. … They could get a quick clue, are these the same idea or not? But with software, there’s no way to do that. The people in the patent office didn’t have enough time. They were both the same thing.

Richard M. Stallman – Software patents

Interesting stuff. “What’s the use of having standards, when you’re not allowed to implement them?” Say no to patents…