Talk:Software patents and free software

More refs needed
I'm done for today, but I'll try to find more refs and more free software people and organisations another day to back up the claim that opposition to software patents is widespread in the free software community. If others have such refs, please note them here or add them to the article. And thanks to User:Edcolins for some initial review and for tagging sentences that need references. Gronky 17:36, 10 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Particularly, I remember hearing an audio recording of a talk that Alan Cox gave that was against software patents, but I can't find that now. The venue was somewhere in the UK or maybe the west of Ireland.  As for the year, I could only say it was between 2000 and 2005.  IIRC "open source" was in the title - I seem to remember starting by saying he'd've prefered "free software". Gronky 17:41, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

Novell deal needs mentioning
The MS-Novell deal of 2006 should get a paragraph at least. Gronky 21:54, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

Anything wrong with the External links section?
Someone has tagged the "External links" section as needing cleanup, but they have given no information about why, what, or how. So the only thing we can do is look at that section, and make our own decision of what, if any, further work is required. I've done this and it seems that that section is now fine, so I will remove the tag.

Tagging articles is a useful function, but please remember to give information about what is wrong, what needs to be fixed, in what way things could be better. I, and I assume others, welcome detailed criticisms. Gronky 15:34, 28 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks for your note and sorry for the lack of explanation.


 * Yes, something's wrong with the External links section. The listed links all appear to present one point of view, against software patents, i.e. the opinion that software patents are a threat to free software. The section is therefore objectionable under WP:EL. Besides, articles by Richard Stallman are linked several times, and blogs, self-published sources, and web sites of possible doubtful merit are listed.


 * "Adding external links can be a service to our readers, but they should be kept to a minimum of those that are meritable, accessible and appropriate to the article." I just don't think the current list of links is appropriate. Does it help the readers to have these links? Not really. Under WP:EL ("1. Any site that does not provide a unique resource beyond what the article would contain if it became a Featured article [should be avoided].") and WP:Bold, I am removing them all. --Edcolins 17:54, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

Neutrality
The introduction should be balanced and should present the various positions on the subject, including the position of the proprietary software (non-free software) "community", companies or developers (e.g. the position of Microsoft on the subject - see WP:NPOV). --Edcolins 20:12, 29 May 2007 (UTC)


 * I don't have time to do a good job but I just made some improvements. I removed some vague statements and added a bit about MS's opinion.  The intro is now overly focussed on MS now though, so more text is needed. Gronky 17:43, 30 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks, it is better now. --Edcolins 18:40, 31 May 2007 (UTC)


 * I think this is an incompleteness issue, rather than a NPOV one. MS seems to be equally s/w-patent anti, so the topic is not that much about OS vs proprietary, but comptech role/business differences betw h/w dealers vs. s/w dealers. Said: Rursus (☻) 08:26, 12 September 2008 (UTC)


 * How is M$ in any way anti-SW patent? They have employed vast efforts (like (co-)sponsoring supportive "studies") and sneaky lobbying tactics (including posing as SME) to try to push the EU's SW patent bill into law. As usual, their actions contradict their words in the most obscene way. 217.230.43.254 (talk) 20:18, 8 December 2009 (UTC)

IP Innovation LLC or IP Innovations?
Right now, we have a link that is supposedly for "IP Innovation LLC", but when I follow it I arrive at the web page for "IP Innovations". Are they the same? 62.181.255.64 09:07, 15 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Probably. These so-called "businesses" (read: parasites) change their names whenever it suits them, like to evade public criticism or law enforcement. Like Diebold (now "Premier Election Solutions"). 217.230.43.254 (talk) 20:23, 8 December 2009 (UTC)

Should mention the OSRM "283 patents" study
The study by (now-dead) Open Source Risk Management which found that the Linux kernel could potentially violate 283 not-proven-in-court patents, should be mentioned. Anyone got some good links which can be used as the basis for this? --Gronky 12:30, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

Google patent promise?
Google have a lot of patents and do a lot of work with free software, but the article says nothing about whether they've made a patent non-agression pledge to free software. Does anyone have any info about this? Thanks. --Gronky (talk) 13:07, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

South Africa minister quote
There's a notable comment here from Fraser-Moleketi, the South African minister of public service and administration, criticising software patents and praising free software:


 * http://www.tectonic.co.za/?p=2304

But I can't decide how to mention it in Wikipedia. Should it go in this article, or in the software patent debate article. Hmmm. --Gronky (talk) 01:05, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Portal:Free software: SP+FS is now the selected article
Just to let you know. The purpose of selecting an article is both to point readers to the article and to highlight it to potential contributors. It will remain on the portal for a week or so. The previous selected article was Wireshark - a packet sniffer which was previously called Ethereal.

For other interesting free software articles, you can take a look at the archive of PF's selectees. --Gronky (talk) 12:23, 6 May 2008 (UTC)


 * I'm glad to see this article has attracted attention while being highlighted on Portal:Free_software. Meanwhile, the new selectee is gNewSense, a GNU/Linux distribution which focusses on being completely free-as-in-freedom.  gNewSense recently celebrated it's 2.0 release "Delta H". --Gronky (talk) 08:58, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Expansion and cleanup
In response to a question by User:Gronky on my talk page...

I tagged this article with two templates: cleanup and expand. I used cleanup for a number of reasons, the most significant of these being the short, choppy blocks of three or four sentences, each under their own heading. A number of sections in the article read like proseline. The more significant tag, however, was expand. This article is absolutely full of references (a good thing!), but it is fairly short. Every sentence has a reference on it, which is good for a featured article but unnecessary for an article of this size. Furthermore, some of the sections (like "Positions from the community" and "Infringement claims") are oversummarized and need additional details. I believe that we could squeeze some more content out of the references we have now.

Of course, feel free to revert me if you disagree. « Aaron Rotenberg « Talk « 02:37, 13 May 2008 (UTC)


 * I don't disagree at all :-) Since I wrote large parts of the article, it's sometimes hard for me to see what's wrong with it, so I'm always interested in constructive criticism.  I'll look into expanding the short sections, particularly the two you highlighted. --Gronky (talk) 08:39, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Reference 35 is not public
Says it's invite only content. (on blogger) Somebody should do something about it. 85.131.30.249 (talk) 12:35, 4 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Link replaced Jdgeenen (talk) 21:06, 7 December 2009 (UTC)jdgeenen

The Patent licensing section
I removed this block of text because it seems much broader than the topic of this article, and the information isn't very accurate. I tried to reword it, but couldn't find anything that would be useful for this article. I may try again later, but everyone's welcome to try :-)

Patent holders can require infringers of their patents to take out a license to continue using an invention covered by the patent, which may or may not require payment of a fee. Otherwise, the infringer must stop infringing the patent, possibly by removing or modifying the patented feature so that the product no longer infringes, or challenging the validity of overly-broad patents (such as the infamous Amazon 1-Click patent) and having them wholly or partly rejected, even if they have been around for years. This possibility may be easier with software than other types of inventions since computer program often perform many different functions or a similar result may be achieved in a different, non-infringing manner. Nevertheless, the software may not be useful without the patented feature.

.Gronky (talk) 17:01, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

This article is having neutrality issues, again.
Seems like all this article is talking about is how patents affect the free software foundation and the free software community in a sad and overly unbalanced way, the neutrality of this article is disputed again! This paragraph shows some neutrality disputed words:

"Community leaders such as Richard Stallman,[1] Alan Cox,[2] Bruce Perens,[3] and Linus Torvalds[4][5] and companies such as Red Hat,[6] and MySQL,[7] and community groups such as FSFE,[8] IFSO,[9] all believe that patents cause problems for free software."

The text, and the whole article, somewhat promotes the FSF and makes it kind of superior over the others. We need to fix this now! DS Crowned (Talk) 14:07, 17 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Why am I not getting any responses? DS Crowned (talk) 01:37, 14 January 2015 (UTC)


 * Maybe because nobody disagrees with you. Maybe because we need to see your WP:BOLD improvements to fully appreciate the issue. ~KvnG 15:21, 16 January 2015 (UTC)


 * As a lawyer (and former IT-specialist) I sympathize with software patent adversaries, but I believe that there is a gap between the rather "populist" politicial position of activists who are opposed to all software patents (and surprisingly uncritical to patents in other fields), and a proper account that can stand academic scrutiny.
 * Before doing a lot of effort and getting only shit on my head, I limit myself right now to some basic perceptions:
 * "Software" in patents is not fundamentally different from other subject-matter
 * Patents in this field are abused like patents in other fields
 * Making a legal exception for software patents runs into problems in case of (complicated) devices that used to be implemented using hard-wired electronics (which is patentable if new and inventive) but now are implemented in sofwtare. It is unjust to allow a patented hardware implementation to be circumvented by a software impllementation. In addition, different rules for "software patents" create legal problems that are a mer à boire for lawyers, but a source of uncertainty for programmers.
 * Economists have identified similar problems for non-software patents (notably in the field of semiconductor hardware) that are very similar to problems often associated with software patents.
 * In sum, yes, sofwtare patents are problematic, but patents in many other fields too, whilst it is unreasonable and unpractical to forbid all software patents - unless the enitire patent system is abolished (like it was in The Netherlands and Switzerland in the late 19th century Rbakels (talk) 14:21, 18 February 2017 (UTC)

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