Last year I had the opportunity to meet Richard Stallman when he visited SA. Stallman, a founder of the Free Software Foundation and rabid advocate of software freedom, has done an enormous amount to forward the ideals of free software over the years.
Software patents are intellectual robbery
Alastair Otter, Journalist, ITWeb
His unbending hippy hacker and zero-tolerance attitude has also, unfortunately, done as much to alienate nearly every businessperson with whom he has come into contact. While it is easy to write him off as a fringe element, one of Stallman`s areas of particular interest and one in which he makes a lot of sense, is the area of software patents; or rather, the need to eradicate them.
Stallman came to mind with the revelation this week that the owner of the JPEG format patent is starting to put pressure on companies to pay up for using the format. JPEGs are all but ubiquitous on the Internet. There is barely a page on the World Wide Web that does not use the format.
Interestingly, if Web developers are not using JPEGs to pretty up their sites, they are likely to be using the GIF format, another format under heavy pressure from Unisys which owns the patent on a core compression technology used by the format.
Corporate control
The Unisys patent fight has been going on for a number of years, and already some users are starting to switch to a similar and open source format known as PNG. But now with the opportunistic actions of Forgent Networks, owner of the JPEG format, almost two decades after the format was first developed, there is a strong likelihood that the Internet will start to be increasingly locked-down by corporate control. And this is an era of technology which is ostensibly moving towards greater openness and open standards.
The issue of software patents is a complex one and there are two diametrically opposed sides, one of which argues patents add business value to their creations, the other that argues that patents do more to stifle the development of technology than any other attack.
On this one, I tend towards the latter. Technology survives through a process of evolution. There is no development without a solid base and to patent technology as it emerges, particularly snippets of code, the base is gradually removed from the public domain.
To argue that patents protect intellectual investment is ludicrous and short-sighted. It is also ignoring one of the most compelling examples of what open co-operation is able to achieve: the Internet. If corporate greed had patented the core elements of the Internet and then charged huge amounts to anyone who wanted to use these elements, where would we be today? Most likely you would not be reading this column on the Internet. And chances are you wouldn`t e-mail it to a friend, because you would have to pay up for protocol that sends it.
Imagine for a second how many JPEGs and GIFs there are on your Web site. Now imagine your site without them. Chances are your Web site would look pretty bland and uninviting, and this is one of the many reasons to reject software patents.
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