"The Electronic Frontier Foundation announced a new initiative on Tuesday to seek reform of the United States patent system. But conspicuously missing from the list is the most direct and obvious way to solve the problem: exclude software from patent protection altogether."
Points again to people worried about threats of lawsuits.
"So, in my view, the OSI should not give in to this blackmail, but should stand firm on the fundamental principle that software patents are an unmitigated harm for free software. It should reject the current proposed licence, and insist that if the MPEG Working Group wishes to benefit from open source, it should play by open source's rules." Amen.
The piece doesn't suggest that startups might really want patents because they are a signal to investors. It's a crap reason, and a good reason to change the system since it only costs startups valuable resources at time when they need them, but it's the reason I've seen in the research.
Nice little gloss on the TAL take on software patenting.
Nice writeup of the MS/TT settlement with an important focus on the GPLv3 and what it can do for us
This is absolutely worth the hour. Intellectual Ventures really is that bad.
Very cool oped by Posner on the state of the patent system. He thinks its totally broken but, because he's Richard Posner, he has some ideas of what to do about it.
