Software Patents : depth first search: "That the people behind the standard get (relatively low) fees seems both fair and a reasonable price to pay in terms of aligning incentives with the need to innovate in order to develop technologies for new markets. It’s hard to square these obvious benefits against somewhat nebulous objections of open source developers."
The problem isn't that open source developers don't like software patents. The problem is that open source developers are effectively unable to use patented technology. If you give your software away and allow other people to give away copies of your software and modify your software and give that away there
- Is no revenue stream to pay licence fees, no matter how small (on a unit basis)
- Is no central register from which a count of numbers of deployments can be made
- The end users of the software with whom you have no relationship may be exposed to patent claims
There are licences that allow the patent owner to offer free use of their patents, but they have to agree to waive all hope of an income from the patents to do that.
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