Stallman gets it right on patents

Sam Varghese
Friday, 22 September 2006 08:02

Opinion and Analysis

The way of the Free Software Foundation is to insist on purity. The way of open source is to seek compromises.

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Once again these two camps have come up against each other - and the issue this time is patents. Last year, the Open Source Development Lab, which refers to itself grandiosely as the "centre of gravity of Linux", set in motion a project called Open Source as Prior Art; the project's aim is to "see fewer poor quality patents."

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."

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