On Sat, 22 Mar 2003, Richard Schilling wrote: > A patent, especially in the case of Dr. Ho, can allow him to > effectively prevent the use of his idea by a company who > attempts to include it in their products and resell it to > customers as if it was their own. It gives him the > *exclusive* right to license a product as Open Source, and > the *exclusive* right to block people who violate an Open > Source license (should he distribute his product under such a > license). It's a good situation.
Richard, It would be even better if I can convince other patent-holders to do the same. Of course, they will be more likely to join if I have some money to pay them. :-) > The key is control and ownership. This is an important point - but sometimes easy to forget because we talk so much about freedom. :-) > If the members of the Open Health community wish to avoid being > undermined by healthcare software companies with established clients, > they need to patent, copyright, and in other normal ways get > themselves recognized in the context of international law as the > creator. Only then can one hope to effectively enforce Open Source > licenses. This is why using GPL will lead to more freedom than public domain or BSD-style licenses. This is also why there are divergent views on whether we could use patents to gain more freedom. The reality is that patents exist and we have to live with them. We can insist that the RIGHT thing to do is to not obtain patents, as some on this list have insisted. This is like putting our software into the public domain without copyright. Clearly, many of us do not agree that this is the RIGHT way. Best regards, Andrew --- Andrew P. Ho, M.D. OIO: Open Infrastructure for Outcomes www.TxOutcome.Org
