The U.S. has already converted to the dark side of software patents. Soon, it will be Europe’s turn to decide whether to allow this silly practice pending a vote on the issue next month.
I have always thought that software patents are absurd and taken as a whole, very counterproductive to the software industry. A quick example: European Patent Office has issued a patent for the progress bar, which is a UI gimmick that can show the progress of a task such as the size of a file being downloaded. With the patent, now whoever writes a program with a progress bar element can get sued by the patent holder.
To rally Europeans against this silly vote, Richard Stallman of Free Software Foundation fame has written a really nice piece called “Patent absurdity”, which I urge all of you to read.
