Hello Sami, What's a software patent ??
A software patent is for software what normal patents are for normal products, i.e. a way "to protect" inventions from being exploited. Usually this means that if you invent something and get granted a patent on it that everybody using your invention in other products has to pay license fees to you. I don't want to discuss normal patents right now, but for software this will be essentially a restriction for what you are ALLOWED to program. Let me give you a real example from the USA because software patents are already legal there. Three scientists designed a pretty clever digital cryptography system called RSA (after the inventors Rivest, Shamir and Adleman). They published it and it seemed like a clever way to achive privacy in an insecure medium (e.g. the Internet), so people started to program it and use it. But then a company (I think it is called RSA cryptography inc.) got granted a patent on this algorithm. This means that you were thereafter not allowed to program this by yourself and give the program away for free - because this violates the patent! This effectively kills the Free Software Community because we won't be able to give away free programs that implement things that are patented. This could range from special things like the example above to the general use of "the concept of a windowing system". Essentially this will take away the freedom for programmers because they would have to check FOR EVERYTHING THEY PROGRAM whether a patent exists for that and if they have to use it, pay for it. When the programmers do not have the freedom anymore then this loss will propagate to the users obviously. I hope that this helps. Feel free to ask more! We have to stop this to save such beautiful and useful systems as GNU/Linux! Cheers Detlev -- "These download files are in Microsoft Word 6.0 format. After unzipping, these files can be viewed in any text editor, including all versions of Microsoft Word, WordPad, and Microsoft Word Viewer." [Microsoft quote]
