February 4th, 2008
Linus dismisses Microsoft patent threat
In an interview with his boss at the Linux Foundation, Linus Torvalds dismisses the threat Microsoft’s patents pose to open source, calling them “a marketing thing.”
His remarks on patents were in the second part of a two-part interview with Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin. Torvalds works for the Linux Foundation.
Zemlin describes the interviews as part of the Foundation’s “Open Voices” series, and hopes to get interviews with people who don’t work for him as well. (My personal apologies to Jim if that sounds snarky.)
In the interview Torvalds calls patents “nasty” but on practical, rather than ideological grounds.
It just does not work in software, and the reason it doesn’t work in software is any complicated piece of software contains so many pieces that nobody could even know whether, maybe, one out of a million different things might be under some completely trivial patent.
This is the argument tech companies have been making on behalf of patent reform to the Congress, but those companies haven’t been proposing an end to software patents, rather a streamlined process for dealing with them.
Linus likens the use of patents to foreign policy, with great powers arming themselves with patents and battling the incoming patent suits of “rogue states.” The best answer, he says, is peace.
Who will give patent peace a chance?
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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