Journal 6 , October 3

Article: Red Hat addresses Supreme Court on software patents

RedHat a Linux vendor based here in North Carolina is stepping up to the plate asking the Supreme Court to recognize that software is not patentable. RedHat has a long history of innovation and contribution to the free software community.

Though many people man not notice patents affect everyone. On nearly every thing you by there is printed the patent number, several patent numbers or even patent pending if it went into production before the patent registration was complete. The US Patent and Trademark Office defines a patent as "Patents protect inventions, and improvements to existing inventions. ". Although the US patent office defines what a patent is there is still some debate about patents and software.

Many people think that patents should only apply to machines or devices that take some input and provide another output. Which is how people generally think of patents. However, in the past years patents have also attempted to include software. I personally see this as a problem and many others do as well.

The problem with patenting software is that it limits innovation and progress which is what patents were originally designed to improve. The reason I think software patenting inhibits growth is that even though a certain software feature is patented it should be reimplementable in a different way unlike how it is today where if your software has a feature and it is patented if can't be used by other sofware. A recent example would be OpenGL 3 in the popular Mesa software rederer that has hit a snag a fully supporting OpenGL 3 because floating point textures and a few other features are patented.

I guess this is all due to the mentality that whatever you see on the screen is the software. The problem with that is software is much more than that a lot goes on behind the scenes and if a company wants to reimplement a piece if software with different workings internally they should be able to do that.

Of course you can look at the wine project and see a healthy example of this very thing happening. Microsoft of course owns the copyrights to the windows source code and can do whatever it likes with it. However since it fall under a copyright as software it can be reimplemented differently by someone else. This to some degree lessens monopolization and I think is healthy to the software ecosystem.

A few examples of the sort of things that pop up in software patents.

Google's lauch page
Apple's 3d desktop patent
Patent on drawing a cursor you can always see with the XOR fuction
Patent on saving the image data behind a window

As you can see another problem with software patents is they often cover the obvious best method to do something. How can progress continue if we are constantly being forced to discover different ways do do things worse? And in the case of google's web page surely they should have applied for a trademark on their logos so people would be able to tell it is their page and not patent the web page. As it stands every kid on the block with a text editor and a homepage is up to be sued should google find thier page a bit too much like thiers. I personally think its a free country and should I wish to make a webpage with a logo a search box and two buttons I should be able to do that without hearing from the likes of google.

I applaud RedHat and the Open Invention Network that is also working toward freeing software from patents. It will allow developers to once again develop software without the worry they are encroaching on some company's IP. Writing software will return to its rightful status as an art form like writing a book or painting a picture and not like designing a piece of hardware.