On 12/02/12 14:42, Ben Sturmfels wrote:
On 12/02/12 12:05, Matt Giuca wrote:
I thought that there was a really great idea from a commenter at the end of your talk whereby free software would be considered by law 'in the public interest' and becomes except from applying to patent lawsuits at all.
Not only would this meet our goals of being able to write and use free software without consequence, but it would also encourage businesses to publish free software to protect their efforts. I like it.
I share Ciarán's objections to this idea, but I thought I'd add some points of my own.
...I find it troubling when people suggest special rules for free software. For example, at a recent talk, someone asked Richard Stallman: "if you want shorter (5 year) copyright terms, wouldn't that mean that all GPL'd software would go into the public domain after 5 years and it could then legally be used in proprietary software." And his answer was that there would have to be a special exception for free software so that the copyright term lasted longer. Sorry, Richard. I like the GPL and what you've done, but it seems hypocritical to ask for everybody else's copyright to expire but let us keep ours because it suits our interests.
Free software is in everybody's interest, whereas normally copyright only works in the interest of an individual or company. I haven't heard RMS make such a statement before, however I disagree the two are comparable.
Patents are a plague on the entire software industry. They are bad for free software. They are bad for proprietary software. Patent reform therefore needs to be industry-wide. We can't make this a free vs proprietary issue, because it's bigger than that. It's bigger than the issue of whether source code is available and whether you are free to modify it -- this is a fundamental issue of being allowed to write any software you can imagine, and I want the right to be able to do that whether I am releasing my source code or not.
Matt's last paragraph is excellent and I agree heartily that patent reform is needed for the entire software industry.
There's no disagreement from me that it's a problem for the entire industry. However, there is plenty of speculation that it's going to be very difficult to completely abolish software patents, and that we should aim our sights lower. I don't really agree with this view, however I'm no expert and maybe we really do need to consider looking at this from another angle. At the moment, all I've heard is that if we go down this path, we would need to try to convince politicians that a number of changes (2 at minimum) need to be made to software patent law. Maybe it's easier to just get one change through instead? Ben, you said you are applying the 'Divide and Conquer' approach to patents (since patents are probably also a real problem in other industries). If software patents as a whole is too large a chunk, perhaps dividing out free software as the first step will be easier? I don't know the statistics, however I'd expect the majority of people interested in ending software patents also have a soft spot for free software. With free software patents out of the picture, most probably one could expect that attacking the remaining software patent issues would then be easier. I could imagine software companies eventually turning around to complain that free software is too competitive and they need to be exempt from patents, and we would have proven that changing the patent system is possible, so maybe we would get even more support. Then there's the additional reasons I mentioned before. So Matt, such a first step wouldn't necessarily be in the best interests of the proprietary software industry - true. I'm definitely not saying we forget about abolishing software patents entirely, but just suggesting we fight smaller easier battles at a time in a way that might make the entire war more conclude more quickly. I personally would rather have patents become less and less of a problem over 10 years, over having them wreak Hell on everyone for 10 years until they are abolished all in one hit. But like I said, I'm no expert on what the best approach is. Ben said he wasn't either, and I'm not sure if it's something that's been seriously considered yet.
Endowing a benefit to free software by excluding it from patentability in no way "transforms the BSD into the GPL". Sure if you use BSD-licensed code in a proprietary program you wouldn't receive the proposed patent exclusion benefit.
That was my thinking too. If people want to take BSD code and make it non-free, they would just take on the patent risk no differently than they already do - at least for as long as software patents exist (which I agree, won't be forever if we keep up the fight). Regards, Adam