OSNews

First of all, thank you Eugenia for speaking up against this madness. It's sometimes hard for people to understand that in order for technological progress to work in any meaningful way, people have to build upon the work of the past. The famous Newton quote is, "If I have seen this far, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants."

Many are against software patents because they believe software should progress in much the same way scientists are able to advance their ideas (some put forth the argument, software = algorithms = math = not patentable). Open source represents a kind of hyper-reversion to the scientific community's system of journals and peer evaluation.

But I'm with Eugenia. I think software patents SHOULD exist, but with an imperfect patent office, it becomes hard for the system to work well. It seems to me the system would work a LOT better if the patent office involved third party reviewers who were university professors and members of the technological/scientific community. As it is now, patents being reviewed merely by "patent clerks" makes the system not work too well.

In addition, I feel like intellectual property lawyers like Lawrence Lessig need to start popping up in greater numbers. By that I mean lawyers who are informed enough of both legal and technological issues enough to be able to fight cases and set precedents all the way up to the Supreme Court, if necessary.

As for PantherPPC's arguments, I find it very unsettling that you think the reason the system should be allowed to work is because Apple is merciful. When you slice it down, that's all you're saying. Corporations have no incentive not to be merciful, so they will be, and so open source developers have nothing to fear. But this loses sight of the big picture. If Apple has the RIGHT to stop KDE from using this or that general UI concept, whether they do or not is of little consequence. When we argue legal matters, we argue rights, not whether those rights will be exercised.

With your ideas, I could put forth the argument: Well, in an anarchistic society, though everyone has the RIGHT to kill anyone else, few would actually exercise that right, because there is no real incentive to killing. So why worry about it?

You're right not everyone is like SCO? But some companies ARE. The point of a good law is to allow the benevolent companies like Apple to flourish while also disallowing the evil companies like SCO from trickery.