On Sun, Feb 12, 2012 at 12:05 PM, Matt Giuca <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Also, would this law be applied to free-as-in-speech software, or > free-as-in-beer software, or both? If I write a proprietary program > but give it away for free (freeware), am I exempt? If I write a GPL > program but sell it, am I exempt? It seems a tad unfair to say that > commercial open source software is exempt from patent lawsuits, as it > would mean that a company could gain exemption merely by providing the > source code to their software. That would further our interests, but > I'm not sure it would really be in the interest of the industry. > Let me see ... hmm, yes. Also, important would be: *how* FOSS is exempted by the patent laws! Along with the monopoly, the patent law creates a protection: cannot patent something for which prior art exists. In the assumption that the patent law does not apply to FOSS, will FOSS still benefit by the same protection? (i.e. suppose Jose Garcia<http://www.bbspot.com/news/2003/12/valve_unified_theory.html> implements the Unified Theory in an Open Source physics game engine. Would Valve be able to patent it?) What the software patent supporters would do to a politician arguing the exemption of FOSS from the monopoly applicability of the patent law but still keeping the benefit from the protection of the prior art provisions of the law? Adrian _______________________________________________ Free-software-melb mailing list [email protected] http://lists.softwarefreedom.com.au/mailman/listinfo/free-software-melb
