OSNews: de Icaza: Rest of World Will Force US Into Linux

“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…”

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