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Of course if you sell, give away, or
donate something, then you won’t be able to keep it. I just found it interesting that with all
the talk about how bad some perceive patents, that the church would find them palatable
enough to solicit them. From the page, it sounded like the church would
keep them and profit from them. Someone once asked me to show them the
church’s official position on patents. Although some will no doubt
argue to the contrary, that seemed like an official endorsement, to me. Some patents are stupid and that needs to
be cleaned up – I once saw an SGI patent, filed in the mid 90’s,
that patented clicking an icon on a desktop to launch a program. Can
anyone think of some prior art? I think that the USPTO was asleep. Stuff
like that needs to stop, because it is souring the entire system. Still, I don’t like the full swing
that some have made. I’ve been told that I don’t have the ‘moral
right’ to keep inventions for my own benefit and that they ‘belong’
to everyone. I’m still puzzled as to why the majority gets to
decide that for the individual. To many, ‘freedom’ must
depend on perspective. In a recent interview (http://www.forbes.com/2006/03/21/gnu-gplv3-linux-cz_dl_0321stallman2.html),
Richard Stallman was asked, “Would it be ethical to steal lines of unfree
code from companies like Microsoft and Oracle and use them to create a
"free" version of that program?” Here is his answer: “It
would not be unethical, but it would not really work, since if Oracle ever found
out, it would be able to suppress the use of that free software. The reason for
my conclusion is that making a program proprietary is wrong. To liberate the
code, if it is possible, would not be theft, any more than freeing a slave is
theft (which is what the slave owner would surely call it).” We seem to live in a world of ridiculous extremes
… where are the ‘happy mediums’? Steve From: Jay Askren
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Of course if we had a software patent in an area where we were planning
to do more work, giving the patent away would mean we could no longer use our
idea which would make us dislike patents even more. So it doesn't seem
like this would be a good idea if we had a patent that came from our open
source software. Jay
On 4/12/06, Steven
H. McCown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote: For those of you who dislike patents, but happen to have them, here is
a |
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