[FYI] Version 1.1b (work in progress)

["Axel H Horns" <horns@t-online.de>]

http://libresoft-doc.sourceforge.net/stable/paper/

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                       Free Software / Open Source: 
                 Information Society Opportunities for Europe?

                      Working group on Libre Software1 

                               March 2000 
                    Version 1.1b (work in progress)

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http://libresoft-
doc.sourceforge.net/stable/paper/Open_source_software_patent.html

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Open source and software patents 

Software patents, especially when they are granted for trivial 
algorithms that can easily be reinvented by many developers,
represent a serious threat to individual open source developers and 
small organizations, who cannot afford the costs of patent
litigations. Ironically, the situation is even more crucial for open 
source software than for black box propietary software, since
the code is directly accessible by the patent holders. 

In many cases, companies and individuals are trying to get exclusive 
right on certain technologies through patents, and recently more and 
more patents on fundamental algorithms and procedures have been 
granted, especially in the United States. We believe that this is a 
potentially dangerous practice, not only for open source software in 
particular, but for the software industry and software practicioners 
in general. The relatively long timespan of currently issued patents 
and the breadth of some of them are specially disturbing. Also, there 
is insufficient control on the existance of previous work, and many 
patents are issued on obvious and ill-defined concepts. These patents 
can be used as broad-fire weapons against competitors, especially the 
most smaller ones, unable to afford the costly legal expenses needed 
to demonstrate that a patent is invalid.  

Several clear examples of silly patents have been already exposed by 
the specialized press. For instance, one of the latest cases is a 
patent on a `novel' method to correct Y2K problems, using an obvious 
and widely known technique19. Another example is a recently issued 
patent on an enhancement to the readability of fonts on liquid 
crystal display, based on sub-pixel addressing. This technique was 
not only well known and employed widely on the old Apple II computer, 
which uses a curiously similar system to create on-screen colors, and 
that enabled to create a double-hires mode using half pixel shifts 
and single color addressing, but also presented in several papers 
through the years.  

Open source software is especially vulnerable to patent-based 
attacks, because only a few open source-based companies have the 
financial power to protect themselves against patent lawsuits. Also, 
if a patent is issued on a very broad technology or technique it may 
be impossible to circumvent the patent and create a patent-free 
alternative.  

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