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Patents virtual minefields INDIA should avoid the "minefield" of introducing patents in software, cautions an American expert who is a strong advocate of free and open source software. "Software patents is a very critical issue and I understand the Indian Parliament is considering whether to allow it," Free Software Foundation head Richard Matthew Stallman said at a meeting. Stallman, who has been spearheading a campaign to keep software free and non-proprietary, leading to the development of the GNU/Linux operating system threatening to challenge corporations like Microsoft, warned that patents were not suited to a field like software. "When writing a (software) program, you typically combine different ideas. Anyone trying to develop software—unless it’s very small or limited in size—is going to be stepping onto a minefield," he cautioned. Added Stallman, who began the free software movement in 1984: "This is an issue that is going to affect all software developers. In the USA, there are already over 1,00,000 software patents. So that means there are a lot of things we (developers) are not allowed to do." Calling software patents
"incredibly dangerous," he said right now European Union (EU)
was in the process of taking a decision on this issue. Stallman said countries in the West were better equipped to file patents and also pump in money to fight cases over them. He also noted that two
countries—India and Brazil—have been showing an "increasing
awareness" of the social aspects of computing. Both have been
working on building affordable computing solutions and taking IT to the
common man in a number of ways, he pointed out. -
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