R's source code is released under the GPL. MATLAB has a GNU-licensed equivalent (GNU Octave), which has been around since 1988. How could you patent a language

R's source code is released under the GPL. MATLAB has a GNU-licensed equivalent (GNU Octave), which has been around since 1988. How could you patent a language? What are you patenting? The compiler/interpreter? The context-free grammar (assuming it has one)? The language specification? If the specification, then you really mean a copyright, not a patent, because a language specification is just a description of a language, and you can't patent that. But just because you've placed a copyright on your description doesn't mean you hold a copyright on anything that anybody creates after having read that description - that would be ludicrous! Sure, we can talk about the compiler/interpreter itself, but that doesn't prevent someone else from going ahead and creating a completely separate compiler that implements the same exact specification (look at the GNU Compiler Collection, more commonly known as gcc).