[Gllug] Software Patents - reply

[Richard Jones]

On Thu, Jun 12, 2003 at 03:57:54PM +0100, SteveC wrote:
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,975126,00.html

Actually the real issue is not patents themselves but the length of
patents (17 years or so). If software patents lasted 3 to 4 years at
most then that would be plenty of time to exploit them, and wouldn't
mean we have the current situation where an increasing number of
common tasks are off-limits to free software.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Red Hat Inc. (London) and Merjis Ltd. http://www.merjis.com/
http://www.annexia.org/ Freshmeat projects: http://freshmeat.net/users/rwmj
"I wish more software used text based configuration files!"
 -- A Windows NT user, quoted on Slashdot.

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