European Parliament Rejects Software Patents
 

But... but... what are we supposed to worry about now? There'll be no panic-inducing headlines appearing daily in the geek news!

:D

I'm seriously impressed by the majority they got - here we worried that they might not scrape the 300ish to get a majority, and >600 voted against it. Incredible!

Software patents - sanity at last ?
 

Europe says no to software patents.

Check here http://www.linuxformat.co.uk/modules...article&sid=56

when i 1st started reading it I assumed I would have been passed!

Horray for a bit of common sense!! (at least Europe holds on to a bit of sanity - shame about the US, but then again the US has voted a selfish idiot for president twice now - say no more!!)

(microsoft obviously didn't give them enough backhanders)

Although it's a step in the right direction it's not over.

They didn't get it in through the EU but there's still chance through the individual countries themselves

Actually, this was something of a victory for the pro-patent lobby.

The EU parliament has been against the patentability of software right from the start. Had the parliament gotten its way, we'd have had an outright "NO! You can't patent software!"

Instead, whilst we at least don't have a "Yes", we don't have a "No" either, so SW patents are still out there in limbo. This was less of an "anti-patent victory" and more "pro-patent defeat-avoiding"

There's still plenty of work for the FFII and co. to do.

So, what does that mean? If there are no patent laws, does that mean I can reverse engineer any program, recompile it and call it my own? This would be good for companies who corner the market and don't allow any small competition, but it would suck for people who make their living off writing software for a small company if anyone can reverse engineer. Am I mis understanding this? (I don't have enough knowledge yet so I don't want to go half cocked.)

copyright still exists
so you can't just recompile, you would have to rewrite the program completely and make it different

EDIT: actually I'm unsure too, but its not that bad for you. You can't be sued by another company for something silly like mouse moving over widget changes the widget to another widget (sorry I'm not a programmer, but I don't think that is possible its just a example)

Ok, so if copyrights still exist to protect peoples work, what does an anti-patent on software mean?

FWIW, there's breaking news of a Red Hat and Sun alliance related to this:
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/050706/65723.html

And, actually, according to people who know what they're talking about:

"This outcome is a clear victory for open source," said Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems.

Say that you have a brand new idea for an algorithm to compress music files, which results in file size down to 1 per mill of the source file, turns any old 1920' mono recording into 8-channel stereo 32bit sound, lets the sun shine whenever the program is started and makes the girls run after you. Now you write a closed source program which implements this algorithm and which you sell for 100,- credits for each license.
As you are the copyright holder on your program, nobody else is allowed to copy and sell it without your permission.
Since you can not have a patent on the algorithm, anybody else who knows it is allowed to write his own program implementing it, so there could be, for example, an open source version of it.
Dis- and reassembling, other forms of reverse engineering which may or may not be legal will not harm your copyright, that is, even if third persons were allowed to reverse engineer your software (for example, here in germany companies are actually allowed to do so under certain circumstances, for maintenance purposes), you'd still hold all the rights on your software.

I just wrote a first draft of an article on the subject that might be of some interest:
Does FOSS have a future?

Ahh, I see. So basically if someone else figures out how to do the same compression, sun shine, girl attraction thing, then they can make their own program. If it was patented, then they couldn't and I'd corner that market. I get it now. Sure, makes sense. Good thing it wasn't ok'd then. Imagine if someone patent software that could cure cancer and then patented it and didn't offer it? Wow.