Patents Standing in the Way
They also cause environmental harm
Patent insanity is a common theme to be explored here. A few hours ago we shared an article about patents on meat. How far will patents go? Sites like IP Kat have just attempted to legitimise the concept of meat patents.
Now consider computers.
"They are moving from the SSE2 requirement to AVX2 because the patents of SSE2 have expired," Sompi said a few hours ago in IRC. "This has nothing to do with efficiency, and the earlier SSE2 requirement had neither" (as usual).
"Rustaceans and many open source library developers also went with that SSE2 requirement and made lots of hardware unusable with it," he said. "Why are they doing all this even now when the prices of new hardware have skyrocketed? Seems that they are only accelerating the requirement increase at the worst possible time..."
MinceR said, "maybe they want to force people to rent computing capacity..."
"At the same time there's more and more websites that don't even work with Firefox," Sompi noted. "And while looking at the instructions that came with that AVX2 extension, I don't see anything that would benefit a web browser that much. Don't those CPU instruction set patents also prevent implementing them in an emulator?"
"How is it possible that even in the free software scene there's so many contributors that don't see this as a problem [...] And purposely write software that cannot be legally ran on an emulator?"
Sadly it has been a long time since we last saw any detailed article about software patents.
We recently saw software patents disguised as "hey hi" celebrated in a Microsoft-connected publisher:
Only about a week earlier that same site promoted the same nonsense, with software patents being celebrated as "hey hi" leadership or 'growth' (in patents).
Patents don't exist to reward invention. Patents exist to protect and broaden the reach of monopolies. █
Image source: Burglars and Dynamite