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

[PILCH Hartmut <phm@a2e.de>]

> 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.

What makes things still worse was that in Europe the proposed solution was
even enacted into the laws.  But the EPO has broken these (and many other)
laws.  Even in the US software patents are a result of an abuse of law, as
Jim Warren of Autodesk pointed out very nicely in his testimony in 1994

        http://swpat.ffii.org/archive/quotes/#autodesk94

but this wasn't as evident as in the European case.  Concerning the
broadness problem, which is the surface from which the underlying
technicity problem can best be understood, I also recommend very much
reading the quote from Ron McQuaker, former president of the British
Computer Society, on the same page, and of course the speech from which
this quote comes.

Indeed broadness is the door-opening key to the whole argument about
software patents.  The patent system offers only insufficient means for
limiting broadness.  One of them is the concept of technical invention,
and we can't do without it.

-- 
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/