Bonum Certa Men Certa

Red Hat States Its Case Against Software Patents

"The European Patent Office is an executive organisation, it deals especially with patent applicants, as such, its view of the world may be biased. As an executive organisation, its interpretative powers are very limited. The European Patent Convention excludes computer programs, it is outside the EPO's power to change this."

--Ante Wessels



MS and GE (Microsoft and General Electric) have jointly filed their case in favour of software patents in Europe (de facto banning of Free software) and FFII has made their mockery available as HTML, but what we also have is the submission from Red Hat, which only Glyn Moody appears to have analysed. As he put it:

My reasoning was that this was an extremely technical consideration of the issue of software patents, and that the people pondering the matter would not be interested in vague philosophical waffle about why software patents were a bad thing. They would be looking for keenly-argued, legalistic comments of the kind I was manifestly unable to provide.

Instead, I thought it better to leave this one to those better able to obtain some heavy legal advice on what should be written, and how.


Steve Stites, a regular at LinuxToday, writes:

I think that a more appropriate title for the article would be "Red Hat speaks for us all on software patents".

Thank you, Red Hat.

Red Hat presents the Open Source argument against software patents very well. I would also like to see a commercial software company such as Microsoft present the commercial argument against software patents. Software patents are less than a zero sum game among the commercial software companies. They create a net drag on the commercial software industry. Microsoft has the largest loses of any company in the software patent wars and they are the logical commercial candidate to lobby for the abolition of software patents.


Despite some uncertainty, Red Hat makes it clear that it is against software patents. So now is the right time for Red Hat to stop filing for some. Hypocrisy is not a good advocacy tool.

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