Software patents versus innovation

By Alex Singleton | 21 April 2005

Software patents came under fire at a conference this week dedicated to MySQL, the most popular open source database. MySQL co-founder Michael Widenius told an audience that:

[Patents] just stall innovation... I don't see any difference in a software program and a recipe in a book. It's the same thing to me as a programmer. It's them saying, "You're not allowed to write the sentence you're writing right now because somebody patented it."

Why should some books be banned and some not? Just because it's electronic media. I could say I should be able to patent sentences.

The other founder, David Axmark, pointed to Oracle, the world's second largest software firm, which has come out strongly against software patents. Oracle says that it: "believes that existing copyright law and available trade secret protections, as opposed to patent law, are better suited to protecting computer software developments."

Meanwhile, at the same conference, Michael Tiemann, vice president of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat, decribed the effect of software patents on innovation: "Every time a software patent blooms, it's a promise to cease innovation in that space for 20 years."