On Saturday 30 August 2003 04:08, Chris I wrote: > It does mainly hurt people using OSS, but hopefully those people will > get up and write their representatives, stage a rally, riot, or > something to tell the government that this isnt okay.
it won't hust only OSS people, it would hurt even commercial closed-source software, and R&D, coz the bill is about registering patents on IDEAS, not inventions. [small quote from the site] Advances in software are advances in abstraction. While traditional patents were for concrete and physical inventions, software patents cover ideas. Instead of patenting a specific mousetrap, you patent any "means of trapping mammals" or "means of trapping data in an emulated environment". The fact that the universal logic device called "computer" is used for this does not constitute a limitation. When software is patentable, anything is patentable. In most countries, software has, like mathematics and other abstract subject matter, been explicitely considered to be outside the scope of patentable inventions. However these rules were broken one or another way. The patent system has gone out of control. A closed community of patent lawyers is creating, breaking and rewriting its own rules without much supervision from the outside. [end quote] I think that pretty sums up what could happen if this lawyer paradise goes live... developping software could become a lawyer battle more than a coder's work. IT is becoming a lawyers and bean counters business, like some 3 letters corp playing FUD to pump up its stock quote before selling everything. Azhdeen -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
