An interview with Richard Stallman
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.
LinuxWorld: And so what can software developers do to protect themselves?
Richard M. Stallman: They can't. There's just nothing [one] can do.
Large companies can [indirectly] protect themselves, [in part]. What they [can] do
is get a lot of patents themselves; then, if a large company like IBM
is threatened with a patent by some company that really makes things, IBM
probably has a patent covering something that company makes, probably has
many patents covering them. So IBM will make them cross-license.
LinuxWorld: It's been suggested that free software programmers could create a
patent pool to do exactly that kind of cross-licensing for free software.
Richard M. Stallman: It doesn't have to be just free software developers; other people who
want to protect themselves could join such a pool as well. The problem is
in getting it started, because the bigger the pool is, the more beneficial
it is to join. So the smaller it is, the less reason there is to join.
Nobody has ever been able to get one started.
LinuxWorld: And why do you think that is?
Richard M. Stallman: Persuading companies who have patents to join this pool is apparently
hard because nobody has ever done it.
LinuxWorld: Has a patent pool ever gotten off the ground, as a thing that people
can join?
Richard M. Stallman: Nobody has ever formally started a patent pool. I guess nobody has
seen it was useful to go through that work without having people who were
going to join it.
Other problems are that it costs a lot of money to get
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