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Software patents

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by jaqui

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are they something to be encouraged?
or something to be discouraged?
why?

I think they should be discouraged, as they hurt the quality of applications for the lifetime of the patent.
with a patent, on software, it's more the idea than the specific application that is getting patented, this means you have a significant amount of time with no competing applications. that causes you to not push development of good code and bug fixes as much and as rapidly as they should be.. after all, no competition, so customers have no choice about which app to use.

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by jdmercha

Do you have an example of this?

The only one I can come up with would be the Adobe pdf format. The format may be patented, but it doesn't prevent anyone else from producing a competing product, as long as it doesn't use the pdf format.

by jaqui

since adobe created the Portable Document Format to enable sharing of information I don't think they patented it.
it is just a specific set of postscript formatting codes.
they did copyright it, but they gave the code for it out publicly.
so even if they patented it they gave the right to use free by giving away the codes to read the format.

the only company I know that has been getting patents, or trying to, is microsoft.

since software patents are currently being discussed in legal community where laws are being proposed to enable them, I would really doubt any existing software other than the corrupted code of ms is patented, and that only by bribing the corrupt us government.

by jdmercha

What I'm reading is that Microsoft is trying to catch up on software patents. Adobe has several patents related to the pdf format. Many of which are license free.

IBM has just dontaed 500 software patents for open source use and Sun plans to release another 1600.

But your original question is still a concern. Software development will be (and is) adversley affected out of fear of patent infringment lawsuits.

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