RE: [Patents] Linus: kernel development no longer legally possible

[PILCH Hartmut <phm@a2e.de>]

> So the problem is not software patents per se, but rather the types of
> patents are granted.  Broad claims are made and acceded to.
>
> I am neither a lawyer nor a mechanical engineer, but I think that if I
> submitted an overbroad patent application for a general widget, they would
> laugh at me.  In software, however, they wouldn't.  There must be a reason
> for this.

Indeed the reason is, as said before, that software is pure logic, i.e.
the most abstract form of activity.  In other words, the problem is
"software patents per se" or, expressed in patent language, the fact that
software ideas are not technical inventions (= teachings about
cause-effect relations of controllable forces of nature).

Traditional patent scholarship was able to see the problem and propose
adequate solutions.  But the EPO and its friends were unable to correctly
learn their school textbook.  This "naive or wilful failure to understand"
(Kolle 1977) makes them all the more despicable.

-- 
Hartmut Pilch, FFII & Eurolinux Alliance              tel. +49-89-12789608
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation       http://swpat.ffii.org/
120,000 signatures against software patents      http://www.noepatents.org/