[Patents] Re: patenting everything.

[Tomas Kindahl Tomas.Kindahl@saab.se]

After a little bit of lurking, i hereby speak:

  Hello everybody!

Nick Fleming <marmalade@x-stream.co.uk> wrote:
> 'Nuff said:
> >
> >...[something about FP-GPL]...
> >Because ... it costs shitloads of money!!!!!!!!
> >
> >'nuff said.
> =

> er.. quite.
> =

> I think that approach is best left to those companies that
> have "shitloads of money" and they should be encouraged to patent
> everything that isn't nailed down.
> =

> A cheaper solution is to simply publish as much information as possible=

> to build up a library of public domain software and idea's, very much =

> like the linux community is doing whether they realise it or not.. Ther=
e =

> is also, already 50 years of programs to use for reference - you just =

> have to do a little research to find it.

I very much sympathize with this idea, except that it costs unpaid work.
(Not foreign for me, however). Foremost because it also will become a =

common source for algorithms and methods that may be usable for Open-
Sourcers and other programmers. However: what stops a proprietary
colossus like IBM or MicroSoft from laying patent mine-fields around
the algorithms that we collect? They make some addition here and there
and patents the additions, so that it will become hard to redevelop the
original and free algorithm? Am i wrong in my interpretation of how
patents work? Is it possible to formulate patents that way?

I also thought of a solution of Open-Source-Patent, where the patent
user, by using the patent, admits to never take patents on derivates of
the original patent, but that's more expensive, and might be legally
impossible.

-- =

med v=E4nliga h=E4lsningar (friendly greetings), Tomas Kindahl

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