Hi all.

Looking at www.zdnet.co.uk and came across this new and surprising story.

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/business/leg...9207478,00.htm

Europe has rejected the computer implemented inventions directive which seems to be a very big blow to the large multi-national IT companies.

Any thoughts on how this will affect Open Source in the future and does it mean that the European Patent System will be more mature in the dicision making patent process than the American system.

Regards

hmm... as mentioned in the other thread, EU dudes would be hypocrites if they "made poverty history" (attempted) and then implemented the software patent scheme. As any legistlation made in the EU (or the states) has a much wider global impact, I think that it will affect the world, perhaps in a good way.

titanium_geek

Who cares about Europe anyways (other than Europeans)???
They got rid of patenting software, hooray for 'em, but
what matters as far as the global implications are concerned is how the Americans legislate, and they would rather shoot themselves than deprive their corporate monoliths of their big bucks while the regular Joe gets screwed in the good old fashioned Yankee Tradition.

However the fact that Europe remains patent free allows people to develop Open Source software and then at Europe and then transfer it with impunity over to the US. If Europe had fallen you could be sure that the those monoliths would start strangling the Open Source movement as much as they could.

That may happen, knock on wood...

But bear in mind that, as long as the corporations control the media and the propaganda machines, then the efforts of F/OSS developers will only be restricted to a minority community. What is required for real large scale OSS development is large scale funding, and that can only be achieved if OSS makes itself noticeable in mass media. This cannot happen without capital, and that's something that the corporations have plenty of. It's this 'chicken and egg' situation that keeps OSS in the minority.

As far as that is concerned, the patency (or lack thereof) of software is essentially irrelevant, since even if patency were established, a minority can still continue to develop and distribute applications that are built on API's and based on algorithms that are different from the ones that the corporations have patented (they can't patent every possible permutation and combination of logic that can lead to a particular result any more than a mathematician can patent the proof of a theorem). The only way by which the abolition of patents in Europe would be significant to OSS development is if OSS were present on a sufficiently large scale to have been adversely affected by patenting. That will never be the case unless there exist large scale sources of capital for OSS, and the corporations in the States (that control their lackey-companies in Europe) will never allow that to happen, since they'd lose their monopoly.

The mistake was in allowing ANY software to be proprietary in the first place (during the time when it first started out). I mean, imagine if Newton's Laws were patented, then Relativity would be illegal! This is the result of greedy programmers who saw a way to make easy money based on a few thousand lines of code. It was this myopic and self-centered attitude that's leading to a stifling of innovation in software today.

Look at the whole picture, Open Source is being taken up by those outside America. The American culture is that anything established must be good even if it is a pile of crap and anything that dares to encrouch on its turf must be destroyed in anyway.
How many lawsuits hs MS finalised so far this year?

Outside America is a picture being painted by those who wish to be free from being enclosed by just one company.
Open Source is growing in other countries because they have seen how being locked into one companies product can be counter productive.

Open Source is also helping countries to work together as in Japan, China and Korea whome working on their very own Linux distrobution.

I think Open Source will find it easier to compete against the likes of MS and Sun in non-American countries.

That would be true if these non-American countries had no vested interest in the preservation of American monopolies. But the fact remains that the world economy is integrated in their favour by their own hands. The corporations in these countries are little more than American appanages who make policies based primarily on American Business interests (local corporations are irrelevant as most of them have been marginalised). This archetypal idealogy of competition between OSS and corporate software is not feasable unless OSS gains corporate value (without succumbing to proprietary liscencing), and I just can't see how they'll be able do that.

Actually you're wrong. That's exactly what would have happened if the patent law had passed. You could not build a program with the same function as that specific function would have already been patented. Even if you built it yourself and it was pretty different but still similar enough to something patented, then you would have to pay royalties since you would be considered to be "stealing" ideas.
As a matter of fact, patenting software is like patenting mathematic theorems, which is why it is wrong.

http://www.nosoftwarepatents.org gives a pretty detailed explanation of the whole thing and how detrimental it could be to OS and Free Software. And it would be a lot.

Things are not as bad as you think.

Just to give you an example:

Norway say NO to proprietary formats

Here's what I don't understand. The nosoftwarepatents people aren't arguing that certain specific patent laws are bad, but ALL possible forms of patenting on software will stifle development. If such a blanket generalisation were true, then patented inventions would never be improved by anyone other than the patentee. Then how do you explain the entire history of modern technology where such things have been happenning all the time? I mean, the Americans invented and patented the automotive engine, but that didn't stop the Japanese from buying some, taking them apart, figuring out how they worked and then building better ones, right? The same is true for the solid-state transistor and hundreds of other cases.

No, that is not the case. Your statement is akin to "Stealing CDs from a record store is the same as downloading music off the internet".
Things tend to get more fuzzy when software is concerned. nosoftwarepatents is pretty clear (going into excess detail as well) on the subject that patents on software is not the same thing as patents on technology and thus precedent success of the patent system do not apply here.

Except that the patents on the automobile, which were preventing the development in America of said device, were defeated by one Henry Ford, American tinkerer. You may have heard of him...

There is a difference between copyright law and patent law. Copyright basically covers the code itself and can be written around. Patent covers the process the code was written for; no amount of rewriting will get you around the patent challenge.

...and even if it did, just a challenge on a perceived slight from a big corporation is enough to bring down many a young start-up, just from the legal costs of defense alone.

You may be right, but proving it may cost more than you can afford, while also putting your product on-hold.

I want to patent the following three statements.

for i = 1 to 100 step 1
actions
endfor

i=0
while(i < 100)
increment (i)
actions
endwhile

and

i=0
repeat
actions
increment i
until i = 100

I want to patent the loop. Aha you say, that is fundamental. But then where do I start. Can I patent a nested loop? Can I patent an algorithm? What is it in software that I can patent?

I think the panic comes from a misunderstanding of patents.

what if I wanted to patent the letter a and anyone using it would have to pay me. Ahh... but do I have the right to patent the letter a? did I invent it? did I come up with it all by myself?
originality is required to patent stuff (that's what the guys like ol' albert do at patent offices, among other things)

titanium_geek