Re: Is OSL 2.0 compliant with DFSG?
On Saturday 10 April 2004 11.51, you wrote:
> To me, the easiest course would be to issue seperate copyright and
> patent licences which do not interact. We could then considers them
> individually without playing "hunt the interaction" and people in
> swpat-free areas (including Sweden for now?) may be able to ignore
> the swpat one.
Law and practice has differed for many years, so we have had software
patents in Sweden and EU for a long time. Or, to be more correct, the
European law has allowed software patents for a long time if it is
interpreted the way the patent industry has done, that is you cannot
patent software as such, but software which runs on a computer and
actually performs something forms a unity which is patentable. That is,
if you use your source code for decorating cakes you cannot patent that
software, but if you strangely enough run it on a computer, you have
something that is patentable.
Currently, the EU is working on making the law clearer, that is
expressively allow or disallow software patents. No-one knows yet what
the end result will be (if I would guess, most likely something along
the lines of American patent law, since that is the best for the patent
industry, and they have the strongest lobbyists).
/Anders Torger
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