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Indeed, patenting ideas is an excellent way to prevent free software from usign those ideas while proprietary software can just get the licensing costs from the
by wmt 13y ago
Indeed, patenting ideas is an excellent way to prevent free software from usign those ideas while proprietary software can just get the licensing costs from their profits.
- oscargrouch 13y agoAlso, if the browser concept was patented, how could someone else innovate over browsers, if theres a need to pay for the privilege of being inventive?
- cbhl 13y agoPatenting ideas is also an excellent way to prevent someone else from doing what you suggest; the patent-holder merely needs to grant a royalty-free patent license to everyone once they have the patent. (See Sections 7 and 8 of GPLv2, for an example.)
- slashdotaccount 13y agoPatents and free software aren't necessarily incompatible. For example Raph Levien provides a royalty-free patent grant to software licensed under the GNU GPL that implements his patents. http://levien.com/patents.html http://levien.com/patents.html