Steve Stites

Eben Moglen is advocating that we put some money and effort into the OIN. The advocates for the Open Invention Network, led by IBM, present the OIN as a primary defence for open source software against software patent attacks. They want everybody to go through all of the trouble and expense of patenting all open source software and donate it to the OIN for the collective defence of open source.

I think that the OIN way is a very expensive and cumbersome software patent defence mechanism. It is far cheaper to wage guerrilla warfare against the occasional software patent grenade lobbed at open source than to try to create an expensive and probably useless Maginot Line defence as the OIN is trying to do. I tend to agree with Florian Mueller when he says that the OIN is useless. I would say that it is overly expensive and so far fairly useless.

Currently open source faces a major software patent problem in the Oracle software patent attack on Google. Go ahead, OIN, and prove your worth. Defend open source from the Oracle software patent attack.

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Steve Stites

I think that we need to force the United States Supreme Court to face the software patent issue head on, eyeball to eyeball. One way to do that would be to fight a software patent case all the way to the Supreme Court where the defendent argues that all software patents are invalid including the one they are accused of violating. A less effective, but much cheaper, way to do that would be to submit an an amiae curia with somebody else's software patent case that is being appealed to the Supreme Court.

Another area where should attack software patents is in the U.S. Congress. Congress has been looking at patent reform for several years now. Patent reform is so contentious that no bill seems to be able to make it out of committee. Neverless we should continue to lobby the House Judiciary and Senate Judiciary Committees to include a clause in the patent reform bill to abolish computer software patents. Several years ago I spent some time lobbying Congress to abolish software patents. One of the conclusions that I came to from that experience is that it would be extremely helpful to hire a professional lobbyist to present our position to Congress.

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Steve Stites