Saturday, July 3. 2004

While I was at LinuxTag, I was a participant in a protest against software patents (you can see some pictures of our march, etc. in my LinuxTag 2004 Photo Album). Today I got an e-mail from its organizer informing me of a second protest in Germany and gave me a link to some photos taken during the last protest. You can find those photos here.

Besides being very wonderful photos, looking through them got me thinking about the topic of software patents in a little more detail. Rather than pondering them myself I thought I'd share them with my faithful blog readers -- please feel free to comment and share your thoughts as well.

To be honest, I'm not against software patents -- at least not accross the board. I'm a business man working in an open-source industry, I have a family on the way and I can't put food on the table giving everything I do away. I do agree that software patents can be a very negative thing, however the reasons why they are a bad thing aren't necessarily the same reasons as many people who protested with me believed. Many who are completely against software patents claim that they stunt growth in the industry, allow the formation of monopolies, etc. I say that software patents allow me to, if I choose, actually create a piece software or a better way to do things which I can claim as mine. I don't need to be employed with a major company to patent something, and with software I don't even really need a lot of resources to write "patentable" software. So with software being so easy to reverse engineer, what's so wrong with the idea of there being some sort of assignment of credit for the original idea?

To me, the problem doesn't seem to be that patents on software themselves are bad -- rather that people are trying to patent things which shouldn't be patentable. For instance, consider the progress bar. In Europe the progress bar is patented by someone (although I don't know who). I'm against that, not because its a software patent, but because at least in America you aren't allowed to patent "common knowledge" things. For instance, I can't run off and patent the wheel -- and in today's day and age the progress bar is just as common. On the other hand if I (or anyone, for that matter) develops a new compression algorithm which can compress any data 50% better than any other algorithm, why can't they patent that? It's something they completely thought up on their own, and I think if you develop something unique enough you should have a right to be the first (and only for a time) to gain the benfits of it.

Patents aren't the problem, its the stupid laws that govern the way patents work. You shouldn't be able to patent a piece of software that is considered "common knowledge" -- but when someone comes up with something new, I think they deserve the first bite at the apple for it. If that company is Microsoft, so be it -- you can bet they spent the money to develop it. But the great thing about our industry is that although Microsoft can throw millions to solve a problem, a clever guy can sit in front of his laptop at a bar and come up with the same thing. To a large degree, that's the power of open source -- and when you look at it that way the idea of patenting something actually seems to favor the individual shoebox developer anyway. Unfortunately, the thing about open source is that there is a real danger from some who seem to be content int giving ourselves away into non-existance. Sooner or later everyone needs to make money off their talents, and while open source is an excellent way to prove yourself while you improve the entire industry, writing open source code alone isn't going to put food on anyone's table. Patents are okay, patents which are completely based on the work of others with a slight modification, or patents which are based on technologies and ideas which are common knowledge, are not.

At least that's how I look at it.. let's hear what you think.