Decidement, la presse USA fait la part belle aux critiques des brevets logiciels ces derniers temps, peut-etre le vote du parlement europeen y est pour quelque chose ?
A noter le photomontage amusant de Bill Gates : http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/07/30/business/yourmoney/31digi.184.jpg Laurent (Rappel: pour ceux qui ne veulent pas creer un compte NYT, il suffit de copier l'URL dans la boite de recherche de google, valider et cliquer sur le lien que propose google.) http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/31/business/yourmoney/31digi.html << [...] As recently as the 1970's, software developers relied solely upon copyrights and trademarks to protect their work. This turned out rather well for Microsoft. Had Dan Bricklin, the creator of VisiCalc, the spreadsheet that gave people a reason to buy a personal computer, obtained a patent covering the program in 1979, Microsoft would not have been able to bring out Excel until 1999. Nor would Word or PowerPoint have appeared if the companies that had brought out predecessors obtained patent protection for their programs. Mr. Bricklin, who has started several software companies and defensively acquired a few software patents along the way, says he, too, would cheer the abolition of software patents, which he sees as the bane of small software companies. "The number of patents you can run into with a small product is immense," he said. As for Microsoft's aggressive accumulation in recent years, he asked, "Isn't Microsoft the poster child of success without software patents?" [...] Why did Microsoft increase its patent-application target so sharply just last year? "We realized we were underpatenting," Mr. Smith explained. The company had seen studies showing that other information technology companies filed about two patents for every $1 million spent on research and development. If Microsoft was spending $6 billion to $7.5 billion annually on its R&D, it would need to file at least 3,000 applications to keep up with the Joneses. That sounds perfectly innocuous. The really interesting comparisons, though, are found not among software companies, but between software companies and pharmaceutical companies. Pharma is lucky to land a single patent after placing a multihundred-million-dollar bet and waiting patiently 10 years for it to play out. Mark H. Webbink, the deputy general counsel of Red Hat, a Linux and open-source distributor, said it was ridiculous for a software company to grab identical protection for work entailing relatively minuscule investment and trivial claims. He said of current software patents, "To give 20 years of protection does not help innovation." [...] >> _______________________________________________ Liste de discussion FSF France. http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fsfe-france
