Software Patents Good For Open Source? 150
schliz writes "The Australian software patent system could be used by open source developers to ensure their inventions remain available to the community, a conference organized by intellectual property authority IP Australia heard this week According to Australian inventor Ric Richardson, whose company came out on top of a multi-million dollar settlement with Microsoft in March, a world without software patents would be 'open slather for anybody who can just go faster than the next person.' Software developer Ben Sturmfels, whose 2010 anti-software-patent petition won the support of open source community members such as Jonathan Oxer, Andrew Tridgell, and software freedom activist Richard Stallman, disagreed."
Re:Stallman is anti-freedom (Score:4, Informative)
Stallman may disagree, but he has shown the world how to write a "free" software license GPL3 that's so restrictive nobody in industry wants to use it.
Yes, he may indeed disagree but nothing in the summary (or the links) says whether he does or not.
The rather torturous sentence "Software developer Ben Sturmfels, whose 2010 anti-software-patent petition won the support of open source community members such as Jonathan Oxer, Andrew Tridgell, and software freedom activist Richard Stallman, disagreed." is only saying that Ben Sturmfels disagrees. It says nothing about the views of anyone else mentioned there.
Re:Stallman is anti-freedom (Score:1, Informative)
Stallman may disagree, but he has shown the world how to write a "free" software license GPL3 that's so restrictive nobody in industry wants to use it.
Shavano (2541114) may disagree with Stallman but Shavano hasn't really done much of anything worth mentioning at all.
Re:Stallman is anti-freedom (Score:4, Informative)
Stallman is not mentioned in the article. He's just mentioned in the slashdot description as additional click-bait.
The person we should be talking about is this "inventor" Ric Richardson. This guy patented the free trial/shareware/try and buy concept that required a unique unlock code to activate its software. In 1993, this concept may have been novel (perhaps, thought I doubt it), but the fact that the patent was granted at all is ridiculous.
Since some magazines were already distributing freeware inside of floppy disks with their magazines, it's not much of a stretch to think that it was just a matter of time that a number of those developers would start distributing shareware-like software that required an unlock code to activate it.
And I don't know if this guy got all the money he wanted out of it, since the verdict was overturned so many times over these last twenty years, but this guy's patent is the perfect example of a stupidly obvious idea that's only designed to stifle innovation, not promote it in any way.
Re:Flood the market (Score:5, Informative)
Fairly sure patent applications cost money, so this point is a bit mute.
Yep, it leaves me speechless.
Yes, he did mean moot, as in irrelevant. We're not all prefect[sic].
Try to let non-essentials slide. There's a lot of people on this planet whose first langauge is not Anglais. Would you prefer to try out your Polish, Cyrillic, Kanji, Thai, ...?
Re:Flood the market (Score:5, Informative)
Dear humor impaired /.er, you should not use 'sic erat scriptum' when you are not quoting anyone, because there was nothing erat scriptum. Also don't mix languages and scripts. My native language isn't English, but that doesn't mean I have a free pass to commit every possible mistake.
Try to let harmless humorous attempts slide, perhaps you'd even have fun.
Re:Stallman is anti-freedom (Score:5, Informative)
It wasn't. I can remember trying shareware back in the mid '80s that had limited functionality until you paid for it and entered the code. Sometimes, instead of that, the code unlocked addtional features that the authors hoped were worth the cost.
Better title: Software patents bad for Australians (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Flood the market (Score:4, Informative)
:)
This reminded me of when a dog is looking for his toy and you point in its direction, and the dog keeps looking at your finger. I better go sleep.
We use lots of Latin expressions because they are useful, have a very strict meaning, and have a usual form. I don't think I've ever read the full "sic erat scriptum", neither "exempli gratia", nor "id est"... et cetera (this is the only one that I remember having read in full). But "so" doesn't make sense alone, it is there to say "and so it was written". Meaning there was something that erat scriptum.
Sic sorry to disappoint you, but "[sic]" is to be used only when quoting, as both definitions you pasted explicitly said.