[AktiviX-discuss] Privatising the global software commons...

[Dan]

... you may have invented it and let it roam free, but as with basmati 
rice or anything else that a quick buck can be squeezed from, that won't 
stop em enclosing it:

Coming to a European Union near you: Patents for profit: dystopian 
visions of the new economy

http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-8-40-2370.jsp

"In the patent-free environment, contributions to the common pool of 
programming knowledge come from all corners of the world, from the 
amateur hacker working until 4am in his bedroom to corporations leasing 
the most expensive real estate in Silicon Valley. Richard Stallman, 
founder of the Free Software Foundation, likens reading a piece of 
software code to walking around a city – the expert eye will recognise 
“architectural periods”, little stylistic ticks that identify a piece of 
recycled code with a particular time, even place.

"Software patents take chunks of code out of this vast pool of shared 
knowledge and lock them down using IP law. United States case law 
already shows how companies can use such patents to claim ownership of 
code that had previously been regarded as an open standard. The effect 
is not simply to appropriate and centralise a shared knowledge resource, 
but to make it impossible to create a new programme without infringing 
the patent. Where software is concerned, patents obliterate progress..."