| Stallman gets it right on patents |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Friday, 22 September 2006 | |
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The OSAPA says it also wishes to help people defend themselves against bad patents. "Our strategy to achieve this is simple; help the USPTO (the US Patent and Trademark Office) use Open Source as prior art." A week ago, FSF founder Richard Stallman voiced his objection to the project. RMS, as he is better known, objects to the fact that this is a temporary solution. "It works by annotating free software packages in free software repositories so that ideas in them can be found more easily. It sounds like a good thing because the problems are hidden," he wrote in an opinion column, published on the NewForge website. "Such a project cannot really protect programmers from software patents, because it focuses only on absurd software patents - those that could be legally denied or invalidated based on prior art. However, the greatest danger comes from patents that are not absurd, those for which we have no prior art." NewsForge is owned by Open Source Technology Group.
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