"These are fundamentally incompatible with free software, since patents are about enclosing the intellectual commons -- giving ideas an owner -- and free software is about expanding it for all to enjoy by sharing ideas. But the particular challenges are quite different in different jurisdictions.
"For Europe, the situation is quite clear: software cannot be patented "as such". Or perhaps I should say *ought* to be quite clear, but the intellectual monopolists have been fretting at the edges of this clear mandate against software patents thanks to the addition of those weasel words "as such" in the relevant definition."
