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I was impressed with RMS's solution | 627 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Let’s Limit the Effect of Software Patents, Since We Can’t Eliminate Them
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, November 01 2012 @ 02:33 PM EDT
RMS has been warning over the danger of broad patents,
particularly in software, for decades. Nowadays, his
predictions are coming true: Apple, Microsoft and the rest
of the phone industry are in a very destructive phase of
patent usage. This is MAD (both as the word and the acronym
of Mutually Assured Destruction).
For the longest time, patents were used in the phone
industry to keep the incumbents safe: everyone was cross-
licensing and the boys' club was safe. Then came Qualcom,
that rocked the boat by asking for licensing for their
patents, as they had the lion's share of CDMA ones (note
that all those patents were about standards). Now, we have
Apple and Microsoft that want to be able to enter the market
with little cost (so, cheap standard essential patents
needed) and push the incumbent competition out (with utility
patents). This can only end poorly for all involved...

RMS is offering a solution NOW to stop that war. Note that
it will just take us back to the original case ,where the
incumbents will dominate (with their very real communication
patents).

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

I was impressed with RMS's solution
Authored by: Gringo_ on Thursday, November 01 2012 @ 05:15 PM EDT
I didn't know he was capable of practical thought.
I thought he was only an ideologist.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Let’s Limit the Effect of Software Patents, Since We Can’t Eliminate Them
Authored by: soronlin on Friday, November 02 2012 @ 08:20 AM EDT
It is an interesting suggestion, but I don't see that it will fly.

My TV has GPL software inside, (at least the manual has a source-code
availability paragraph, so I assume it does.) Is my TV a general purpose
computer? I don't see how it can be. So the same software is OK if I use it on
my PC, but infringing if I run it on my TV?

At what point in time did tablet computers become general-purpose?

Some people take routers and other such special-purpose hardware and load
standard Linux on them. It's the same hardware, does the software make it
general-purpose?

The Playstation 3 used to be able to run Linux. Was it general purpose because
it could run general-purpose software, even though 99.99% of owners never did?

I'm sure with enough head-scratching, one could invent rules, but it is not the
bright line that RMS seems to think it is.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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