Free software's white knight
Published: 15 Mar 2006 13:20 GMT
...represent an unbeatable deal. Free software is an immense pile of golden eggs, and now companies have suddenly realised that they need people to take care of the geese that lay the golden eggs.
Do you expect the Law Center to grow in the next few years?
Yes. But at present we don't expect it to grow without limits. In Autumn 2004, we proposed taking it to twice the size it is now within five years, but predicted that it would remain stable after that.
We expect to see more people doing this work in time, perhaps working within organisations for salaries, or within the non-profit sector. Our firm aims to find the best way to use a few million dollars a year to reduce risk and to produce a steady stream of young lawyers with experience in this area.
We expect to export more lawyers than we retain — I expect that more than half of the people here will go on to work somewhere else. I see this as a postgraduate law school in free software.
How easy do you think it will be to recruit more lawyers with a software background?
The very best people will want to work here, because we can let people do what they really care about and be materially secure. I would expect any lawyer working here to have a free software background. We'll have people working here who have studied computer science at top institutions like MIT, who have contributed to free software projects and who have worked at companies like IBM or HP.
As well as your role at the Law Center, you also sit on the Public Patent Foundation's board of directors. A number of large technology companies, including IBM and Microsoft, have called for the US patent system to be reformed. How hopeful are you about this?
The patent system at the moment has two primary users — the information technology industry and the pharmaceutical industry. The pharmaceutical industry is not going to permit any change in patent law that is disadvantageous to itself.
The patent system could be improved for the IT industry by preventing software patents. Stallman has been saying for 15 years that there should be no patents on software. The larger patent system is also a bad idea, but there is not going to be any change in that area so long as the pharmaceutical industry owns as many politicians as they do.
But do patents really affect free software? You rarely hear about companies being asked to pay royalties for patents infringed by free software.
Users are not, by and large, the people from whom patent holders first seek to collect royalties. A better person to collect royalties from is the distributor, as the royalty can be included in price. Are distributors of free software programs sometimes paying royalties on patents held by people who aren't advocates of free software? Yes. But the people paying the royalties don't always have a stake in going public about it.
I don't think the scale of the problem is equal to the level of royalties. Uncertainty is the problem. The problem of patents when they are applied to software is that there is no way of finding out how many patents you could be infringing. When the patent system is applied to something like a spinning wheel there are a limited number of possible patents that people can check on before mass-manufacturing the product. But there is no way to check what patents a software product may be violating.
Programming is an incremental process, so I would say almost nothing could be argued to be novel. But, even if software patents were only issued on really narrow grounds, instead of being handed out like gumballs to someone who puts a nickel in a machine, there would still be...
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