Though the “Microsoft sues phpBB for patent infringement!” topic at phpBB.com’s community fora was a dose of Poisson d’Avril, it’s not as far fetched as you may think because there are a mass of already granted European Patents which kills further innovation and be extremely damaging should they be enforced my law, because unlike traditional patents which were for concrete and physical inventions, software patents cover ideas.
Why? Some quotations…
If Haydn had patented “a symphony, characterised by that sound is produced [in extended sonata form]”, Mozart would have been in trouble.
Instead of patenting a specific mousetrap, you patent any “means of trapping mammals” or “means of trapping data in an emulated environment”. The fact that the universal logic device called “computer” is used for this does not constitute a limitation. When software is patentable, anything is patentable.
On the 14th of April, there will be walking demonstration from Square de Meeus (near Place du Luxembourg) to the European Council building because of a proposed directive dating back to 2002:
In February 2002, the European Commission proposed a directive that would legalise software patents. However, the European Parliament decided in its Plenary Vote of 24th September 2003 to fix all the loopholes in this proposal and explicitly banned software patents.
Currently, the European Council of Ministers is discussing this directive. Their internal working party proposes to simply discard all clarifying amendments from the Parliament. They want to make everything patentable.
Which they will succeed in pushing via the back door if unamended, quoting from one of the many websites closing in demonstration:
Most software will become illegal to use in Europe if this dangerous directive is adopted without proper amending.
The Commission and the Council of Ministers are covertly pushing for unlimited patentability of software, heavily lobbied by multinationals and patent lawyers. They are ignoring the democratically voted decision of the European Parliament from 24 September 2003, which has the support of more than 300,000 citizens, 2,000,000 SMEs, dozens of economists and scientists.
If you aren’t able to make it to Brussels, write to your MEP… preferably before “means of information interchange between physical or virtual entities” gets granted a patent too.
Lastly, it’s not often the BBCi publish a decent article on Information Technology, least not 2 weeks after everyone else has written about it. However, this one is a good homespun one published about a month ago:
It is the conflict between two different ideologies of software development.
One is personified by Microsoft and its closed and copyright-protected code, and the other represented by the free software and open source movements, whose most prominent offering is the GNU/Linux operating system.
And it has become a new Cold War, a fight between competing philosophies which underpin completely divergent economic systems and patterns of social organisation.
Given the growing importance of computer programs in our daily lives and the operation of business. It could well be the defining conflict of the first half of this century, just as the conflict between communism and capitalism defined the latter half of the last one.
How do conflicts get resolved? Like so…
In the new Cold War the chief weapons are lawsuits, press briefings and the sowing of fear, uncertainty and doubt in the minds of customers or potential customers.
Which has led to many law cases such as SCO’s claim ownership of sections of UNIX code, specifically Linux released by IBM under “Copyleft” using GPL (GPL in laymen’s terms courtesy of IT-Analysis).
It is time to accept that both sides cannot co-exist peacefully, because open source offers a fundamental challenge to the business model of the closed source, proprietary software developers, one which they must resist if they are not to go out of business.
It is rather ironic that Microsoft and other closed model companies rather resemble the Stalinist or Maoist model of a command economy with complete centralised control.
Despite claims by some - most notably SCO’s CEO Darl McBride - that free software is some sort of communistic plot against America, open, collaborative programming on the basis of shared code is closer in spirit to the US political system.
It even supports a free market economy where consumer choice is based on full information about competing suppliers.
It isn’t going to happen if people aren’t made aware of it… and if we don’t do anything about it, it may just be too late.
