Software Patents Quotes

I decry the current tendency to seek patents on algorithms. There are better ways to earn a living than to prevent other people from making use of one's contributions to computer science.

Fighting patents one by one will never eliminate the danger of software patents, any more than swatting mosquitoes will eliminate malaria.

Software patents are dangerous to software developers because they impose monopolies on software ideas.

In the early days of the software industry, people cared about copyright and didn't give a damn about patents - they copied each other willy-nilly.

Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.

I can't recall any difficulty in making the C language definition completely open - any discussion on the matter tended to mention languages whose inventors tried to keep tight control, and consequent ill fate.

The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying.

I think software patents are a bad idea. Many patents are given for trivial inventions.

It doesn't cost anything to replicate code. So the companies that make code, that's why they've done so well. We take it for granted now, but why is it that code is free? It's because somebody built this self-replicating process.

Patents should be for technological innovations. So a program for a new machine tool should be patentable but a non-technological innovation, such as grammar-checking software for a word-processor, should not be.

We believe that patents exist to reward the inventors of truly outstanding ideas, not to allow big businesses to stifle competition with an ever-growing tide of trivial, incomprehensible, overreaching patents. We will stop the abuse of patent law by raising the bar on how innovative an idea has to be before it can be patented, and by prohibiting patents on software, business methods, concepts and works of nature. We will require a working model to be provided to the patent office before a patent is granted and we will strictly enforce the current rule that patents are invalid if they are "obvious to someone skilled in the art".

Patent law holds us back, in every which way, shape or form. There is place for it, in physical products, in pharmaceuticals, but in software in particular, there is no place for it.

Our strategy in dealing with patents in Mono is the same strategy that any other software developer would take. In the event of a patent claim, we will try to find prior art to the claim of the patent.

With the rise of software patents, engineers coding new stuff - whether within a large software company or as kids writing smartphone apps - are exposed to a claim that somewhere a prior patent is being infringed.

patents are an arm in the hands of large enterprises which use them in order to block all inconvenient innovation or to restrict the development of free software. The American experience with software patents is particularly negative and merits reflexion

Proprietary software grew up, starting really in the 1980s, as an alternative and that became the dominant model with the rise of companies like Microsoft and Oracle and the like.

I named my software 'EMAIL,' (a term never used before in the English language), and I even received the first U.S. Copyright for that software, officially recognizing me as The Inventor of Email, at a time when Copyright was the only way to recognize software inventions, since the U.S. Supreme Court was not recognizing software patents.

Content zips around the Internet thanks to code - programming code. And code is subject to intellectual property laws.

The software patent problem is not limited to Mono. Software patents affect everyone writing software today.

Software patents, in particular, are very ripe for abuse. The whole system encourages big corporations getting thousands and thousands of patents. Individuals almost never get them.

Most larger companies now see that for the market to grow, Web infrastructure must be royalty-free.