Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 13th May 2007 22:24 UTC, submitted by Havin_it
"Free software is great, and corporate America loves it. It's often high-quality stuff that can be downloaded free off the Internet and then copied at will. It's versatile - it can be customized to perform almost any large-scale computing task - and it's blessedly crash-resistant. A broad community of developers, from individuals to large companies like IBM, is constantly working to improve it and introduce new features. No wonder the business world has embraced it so enthusiastically: More than half the companies in the Fortune 500 are thought to be using the free operating system Linux in their data centers. But now there's a shadow hanging over Linux and other free software, and it's being cast by Microsoft. The Redmond behemoth asserts that one reason free software is of such high quality is that it violates more than 200 of Microsoft's patents."
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RE[3]: Software patents don't make sense
by Gone fishing on Mon 14th May 2007 10:39
in reply to "RE[2]: Software patents don't make sense"
Member since:2006-02-22
If one makes a novel sequence of DNA that cells then translates into a protein, that squence of DNA is just code very mach analogous to a computer program, more or less digital in nature that can be described mathamatically as a squence of A,C,G and Ts.
Should you the be able to patent that code? How about if your code is just a copy of a natural sequence with the introns removed?
Member since:
2006-10-11
It is not, we are just using mathematics to discern patterns. That is a difference. Anyway, genetics are, at most, discoveries, not inventions, thus not patentable. At least in the EU...