Proposed new OSD item - patent termination

[Matthew Garrett]

On Sat, 2005-04-09 at 10:09 -0700, Bruce Perens wrote:

> 4. As you can infer from #2 and #3, the line between hardware and 
> software is blurring. Thus, we are getting many purported hardware 
> patents that are actually software patents.

Wait a minute. I was under the impression that the main issue with
software patents was that the software invention process is very
different to the physical object invention process (faster turnaround,
smaller number of ways to fix the same problem, that sort of thing). You
seem to be implying the issue is the use of /any/ patents against the
open source community. I think that's a very different argument, and I
don't think it's clear that it's the right one.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org