March 26, 2001, 5:05 PM —
Copyright 2000 LinuxWorld
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In December, Richard M. Stallman called for a boycott against Amazon.com due to
its aggressive use of patents against competitor Barnes and Noble.
Stallman, father of the GNU Project, free software activist,
and legendary programmer, graciously agreed to speak with LinuxWorld on how software patents have been a
problem for programmers for nearly 20 years, and how the problem is now
being thrust into the forefront yet again with the recent Priceline and
Amazon.com legal actions. He also talked about patent pools and the League for
Programming Freedom, and about money-squeezers and possible solutions for
the problem of software patents.
LinuxWorld: To start, could I ask you to lay out the basic problems with
software patents?
Richard M. Stallman: Software patents monopolize an algorithm, or a
feature, or a technique so that nobody [but the patent holder] can use
them in developing a program. And this makes software development
dangerous. When you are writing a large program and you're using many
techniques, implementing many features, the likelihood is that some of
them are patented by somebody. Or even a combination of them could be
patented.
