Just a little idea...

[knopper67]

I just had a good idea today... Free Software Patents. Now don't get too excited now because I have a good point about this...

If Free Software infringes Software patents from Proprietary software the company making the free software wound get sued.
But if Proprietary software stole ideas from Free Software no one would get sued because it's free.
Do you see where I'm getting here?

The question is, Is it possible to Patent Free software in a way so that Proprietary Software cannot use our ideas and only Free Software can?

[For example... the Tabbed Browsing feature In Firefox was stole by Microsoft. ]

[Cyvros]

Well, with that example, you could say MS also stole off Netscape, Mozilla or Opera. Or any one of those stole off each other. :D

But isn't there already an organisation that takes out patents for use with free software?

[knopper67]

But isn't there already an organisation that takes out patents for use with free software?

I Have no Idea, the reason for this post was to see if anyone else knew if this is possible :-s

[Cyvros]

I Have no Idea, the reason for this post was to see if anyone else knew if this is possible :-s

Well, I'm sure someone will mention it at some point, because it's been in the news recently. I do know that Sun, at least, has a large number of software patents it was (vocally) ready to use in defense of Red Hat and Ubuntu.

[use a name]

So, you would want to GPL ideas? Then the ideas can still be used by anyone, but they could not lay claim on it. But that's already covered with 'prior art'. If you do not want ideas to be free, but only for free software, then you're actually validating what MS is doing right now.

[Cyvros]

So, you would want to GPL ideas? Then the ideas can still be used by anyone, but they could not lay claim on it. But that's already covered with 'prior art'. If you do not want ideas to be free, but only for free software, then you're actually validating what MS is doing right now.

I'm very ambivalent on this - I want it all to be free, but, then again, I prefer the GPL over the BSD licenses because it makes sure that ideas and apps stay free rather than... how can I say this? It's like they're freed and then captured.

[christhemonkey]

Already been done:
http://www.openinventionnetwork.com/

But only for the linux kernel (I think)

[Bachstelze]

It's like they're freed and then captured.

No, they're not ! If Alice releases a piece of BSD-licenced code and Bob gets it and redistributes it in binary only, anyone who gets it from Bob and wants the source just needs to get it from Alice.

"Well, we do not do this so that other players can make profit. We've actually been doing this for a long time and I do not know of anyone who specifically makes money off OpenBSD. They may, at best, save some money by not having to re-engineer the same software that we have already written. It is not exactly that we are letting them make a profit, but that we are doing a proper job and saving someone else from having to do the same job in a corporate setting. In our eyes, that is perhaps a waste of planet-wide engineer talents, rewriting the same thing over and over. Why can’t we just get it right once?"

-- Theo de Raadt

[mips]

Software patents are BAD. There should be no software patents at all.

[DJ Wings]

Think of the kittens! SCO killed a lot of kittens...

[knopper67]

Think of the kittens! SCO killed a lot of kittens...

SCO kills kittens? Those Ba$tards :shock:

[ukripper]

Well then what would be difference between Open source or closed ones? Whole point of open source is usability as well as amending functionality to your needs. If someone copies open source ideas it should encourage Open source community rather than getting worried.