These gentlemen press a needed case. Software patents are already stifling innovation here in the U.S. Only the largest companies can afford to have teams of lawyers review existing patents to ensure that upgrades to existing software or new software applications don't infringe.

As has been seen by the recent case of Kodak vs. Sun, the liabilities of not performing such due diligence could destroy even large firms.

Contrary to one opinion already expressed, nearly all small (including individuals) to mid-sized companies that develop software for either internal use or use by others, stand to loose their independence and freedom to work for any but the large companies that can afford the extreme costs of performing due diligence and both defending themselves from patent lawsuits as well as upholding their claim to their own software patents.

Make no mistake, the recent innovations in software development would not have been created if the individuals that created them would have had to hire attorneys to perform their due diligence. Open source software has been responsible for the majority of innovation since its inception.

>>Linux and PHP and MySQL have much to lose if strong european

>>software patents become a reality

I think you're exaggerating how much there is to lose by Linus. What would probably happen is the Linux people would have to WASTE THEIR TIME re-writing relatively obvious algorithms that are patented by some corporation that played the patent lottery. Linus doesn't have much to lose personally and economically at this point, I'm sure he's a very wealthy man and has no shareholders to appease. So to say that he is acting out of his own economic self interest is pretty much bullshit.

If you don't see that there is reason to take the word of someone who is essentially a software philanthropist over the word of a faceless corporation that has a track record of fierce and sometimes illegal anti-competetiveness, then maybe you need to open your eyes?

According to Florian Mueller, the independent software developer who's campaign manager for Nosoftwarepatents.com, the Polish government has withdrawn its support of the legislation which might make it impossible for the Council to muster the votes required to approve the directive.

Linux and PHP and MySQL have much to lose if strong european software patents become a reality since both are technologies that, for whatever their pluses, rely heavily on imitating prior art.

Therefore, it is little surprise that they'd come out against software patents. It's like hearing exactly one side of the argument. I don't see any reason to take their views as somehow more correct or enlightened than microsoft's or IBM's might be from the other side. each actor is acting in his economic self interest in a pretty blatant way.

The U.S. never officially adopted software patents. The U.S. Supreme Court always ruled that software for a general-purpose digital computer is not statutory material for a patent. Lower court decisions appear to have contradicted the Supreme Court, and the USPTO has certainly granted many patents like the ones the Supreme Court struck down, but software patents have never been formally legalized. If the EU formally legalizes software patents, they will precede the U.S. in doing so.

Hear hear, those Europeans should scrap the Directive on the Patentability of Computer-Implemented Inventions - if these 3 say that software patents are "deceptive, dangerous, and democratically illegitimate" then surely people need to listen

Linus has ssaid elsewhere too that open source software isn't any more likely to infringe on software patents than is proprietary software, but patent licenses can be incompatible with open source software licenses and software patents themselves put a special burden on open source developers - who are often independent contributors, often without the financial resources to fight off spurious patent claims. Support this cause!