Official position of RedHat regarding software patents

[Xavi Drudis Ferran]

El Wed, May 29, 2002 at 05:48:58PM +0200, Bernhard Reiter deia:
> Note 2:  In my eyes Software on which a patent exists does indeed
> take away the second freedom to study how the program works.
> What is studying worth if you cannot use your learned knowledge 
> (ideas not the code) to implement something similiar and use it to earn money.

I think you hit the basic contradiction in software patents:

A patent is a temporary monopoly on commercial use of a machine in exchange
for publication of information on the machine. 

When the machine is itself information, the (rough) definition of patent
above collapses:

A patent is a temporary monopoly on commercial use of information in exchange
for publication of the information. 

you can't publish information (i.e. make information available for the public to use)
and forbid its commercial use, because then you get only noncommercial use, which 
is both very difficult to isolate, and contrary to the intention of patents (that's
why "industrial aplicability" is required). 

All kinds of nonsense can follow from this contradiction. Information just does not
work that way. They say information wants to be free, and some might not agree, 
but the least you can think is information wants to be. Software patents pretend information
to be _and_ not to be, this is the question.

-- 
Xavi Drudis Ferran
xdrudis at tinet.org