Re: Danger of software patents in Europe
Hello Sami,
What's a software patent ??
A software patent is for software what normal patents are for normal
products, i.e. a way "to protect" inventions from being
exploited. Usually this means that if you invent something and get
granted a patent on it that everybody using your invention in other
products has to pay license fees to you.
I don't want to discuss normal patents right now, but for software
this will be essentially a restriction for what you are ALLOWED to
program.
Let me give you a real example from the USA because software patents
are already legal there.
Three scientists designed a pretty clever digital cryptography system
called RSA (after the inventors Rivest, Shamir and Adleman). They
published it and it seemed like a clever way to achive privacy in an
insecure medium (e.g. the Internet), so people started to program it
and use it. But then a company (I think it is called RSA cryptography
inc.) got granted a patent on this algorithm. This means that you were
thereafter not allowed to program this by yourself and give the
program away for free - because this violates the patent!
This effectively kills the Free Software Community because we won't be
able to give away free programs that implement things that are
patented. This could range from special things like the example above
to the general use of "the concept of a windowing system".
Essentially this will take away the freedom for programmers because
they would have to check FOR EVERYTHING THEY PROGRAM whether a patent
exists for that and if they have to use it, pay for it.
When the programmers do not have the freedom anymore then this loss
will propagate to the users obviously.
I hope that this helps. Feel free to ask more! We have to stop this to
save such beautiful and useful systems as GNU/Linux!
Cheers
Detlev
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