:OSNews: de Icaza: Rest of World Will Force US Into Linux
OSNews: de Icaza: Rest of World Will Force US Into Linux May 11, 2004, 01 :00 UTC (6 Talkback[s]) (10128 reads) (Other stories by Eugenia Loli-Queru)
"The discussion quickly got steered into the patent problem. Miguel is very aware of the patent situation in US today and the dangers this [will] mean for Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS). He acknowledges that most patents today should be invalid, as they were filed over trivial technical solutions, but the US patent office seems to be doing a poor job seperating the valid ones from the trivial ones. This situation creates many lawsuits every year in US and according to Miguel, this will only get worse with time. Apparently, for many companies, this is a fast way to make some easy money by suing other companies (over trivial technical matters sometimes). The F/OSS developer community hasn't had the problem upon them yet, but as F/OSS becomes more and more popular, Miguel believes this will eventually become a real problem..."
