September 24, 2003
Patents revisited
After lengthy debate, the votes are in on the EU software patent debacle, and opinion is divided over just how good or bad the result is. The legislation got through, but so did many of the limiting amendments proposed by the Free Software community. Time will tell, but on the whole I think it could have been a lot worse.
Steven suggests: this should be countered through open source licenses, i.e. by adding clauses which disallow companies that abuse patent law for their own good to use a given open source project.
Unfortunately this is not an option - if you did this, you wouldn't be releasing free/libre open source software. All of the open source definitions have a "non-discriminatory" clause in them - for the FSFE, it's clause 4. The OSI is a little more specific with clause 5.
The idea of non-discriminatory open source makes a lot of sense. Once you start disallowing usage of your software, it's difficult to know where to stop. Do you disallow companies that abuse patent law? The companies that support them? Companies that use their software? Let's prove we're better than them by not stooping to their level!
Posted by savs at September 24, 2003 4:11 PM