[Patents] Black and white

[phm@a2e.de (PILCH Hartmut)]

> Dear all,

> I have been reading some threads for weeks, and the feeling I have is
> that you really see the world in a black and white way.

> For instance, the threads about "Free software vs software patents".

What thread was that?
I don't remember such a thread.
Why don't you quote?

> However,

Against which position are you arguing?
I may excuse it, if you are too lazy to quote.
I can not excuse it if you can't even summarise the position which you are
criticizing.
Then it becomes clear right from the start that you are just building a
strawman.

> if you look carefully how works the business, the same
> companies may fund free software AND file patent applications. The 2
> worlds could exist together.

"When someone sells guns in town, we as a rationally acting company will
of course make sure we get the best guns", said an IBM representative at a
software patents hearing in London last fall.  And of course he was right.
He continued:  "That doesn't mean that we approve the mayor's policy of
selling guns".

If the mayor decides that guns are to be the decisive factor of survival,
a company like IBM can thrive, but unarmed free software developpers can
not.

IBM is not the main motor of free software development and their
opensource stragegy may change any time.

There is even now a case where it is IBM who is demanding that Linux
servers be distributed without proper support for truetype fonts.  Not
because they are aggressively using their own patents, but because they
are afraid of being attacked by others.  When even IBM is afraid, how
can then private software enthusiasts, to whom we owe most free software,
feel secure?  If they for some reason still feel secure today, how do we
know they will tomorrow?  In fact even today quite a few free software
projects have already been scrapped or discouraged by patents.  And at
least one large software patent owner is repeatedly making statments that
free software must be fought because it "harms the intellectual
property of companies and countries".  This same patent owner has also
stated that software patents are one of the most effective weapons in
fighting free software (go to http://www.opensource.org/ and look
for the "Halloween Documents").

> Another manichean thread is "US patent owners" against european poor
> company".

I know of no such thread.
Apparently just another strawman.

> But where do you have seen that european companies do not have any
> software patents ??  The point is that every software company having a
> long-term strategy do have software patents, in US or in Europe.
> Anyway, it is somewhat stupid to see the world as a Europe vs US war.

Yes, you have built a stupid strawman.
Nevertheless it is a fact that European companies own less than 20% of
the software patents granted by the EPO.

> Last (only because I have no time to go through every arguments :-) ),
> there is always and always the same old argument about big company
> owning patents and start-ups without any.
> Again a stupid dichotomy :

=2E.. built by you and nobody else.

> - a lot of startup do have patents !
> - the main asset of a start-up vis a vis big companies when
> negociating partnerships or contracts is patent portfolio. Otherwise,
> how to measure their know-how and what they bring ? In addition, a
> start-up making R&D without patenting may easily be copied by other
> bigger companies (or other start-ups : start up does not mean white
> goose !). The only mean to prevent this is patenting !

Software may not be copied, due to copyright.
Rewriting software takes a lot of time, usually about as much as writing
the first software took.
Usually big companies have other things to do than to look for some
promising software written by a small company.

> Again, one may go on and go pointing out the silly arguments that some
> of people there do write and rewrite all the time.  I hope that many
> of them are still students, so without any real knowledge about
> business world. That may be an excuse.

I hope that the person who wrote this is just a young apprentice from a
patent law firm or a student of a law school with no experience of
real-world software business.  That maybe an excuse ...

> But seeing everything in b&w, good vs evil,... well youth and
> inexperience is not a sufficient excuse :-)

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=2E.. but I fear that this is not true.  We are dealing with M. Breese or
some of his old-age, brain-dead patent movement ideologues, who believe
that the other side must be as ideological as they themselves are.

The "opensource movement" as a young group of unexperienced idealists with
some kind of manichean anarcho-syndicalist background ... that is the
propaganda which they are relentlessly trying to spread.  And it is the
reason why they are neither able to quote nor to summarize any real
arguments made by their opponents.

-phm