Another post on Intellectual Property for y'all.

So recently Microsoft and Novell did a deal whereby they will collaborate and cooperate to make SUSE Linux and Windows work better together. Importantly it also provides for patent indemnity for users of SUSE Linux and non-commercial contributors to SUSE (and by proxy other Linux distros).

So you'd think this would be a good thing, right?

Well it seems that the chunk of the open source community have their knickers in a twist over it.

I guess, to a degree, it all comes down to whether you support software patents or not. Now this is indeed a highly controversial area, but, as a talented software developer I fail to see why innovation in our field should be any less deserving of patent protection than say engineering or biotechnology.

Yet that's what the folks on the Samba team seem to be suggesting. Their opinion isn't just that open source software and patent rights do not go together, for the MS/Novell deal shows that they quite happily do. Instead they are quite vehemently opposed to software patents altogether.

Now I'm not always a huge fan of those enforcing their so called rights (see here on trademarks and parallel importing for example) and we should certainly be discussing and criticising the bredth of some of the patents that have been awarded by IP offices around the world- software and business process patents being the worst examples in many cases. But, a few bad apples or a bad interpretation of scope does not render software patents bad, per se.

We have patents for a reason, to encourage and reward innovation. They are a VERY powerful right to be able to enforce and as such we should be careful when awarding them, but, I really struggle to see why software should be any different to any other technological pursuit- people should be rewarded for genuine innovation.