Getting patents

Getting patents

Posted Apr 14, 2006 14:57 UTC (Fri) by dwheeler (subscriber, #1216)
In reply to: How Mono got into Fedora by im14u2c
Parent article: How Mono got into Fedora

Actually, that's already being done. Red Hat in particular gets patents and releases them for use in Free Software.

But most people who write Free Software are either in companies that are not exclusively Free Software companies or they are students. Companies practically always own patents of any of their employees. Shockingly, universities have managed a land grab and can often claim ownership of their student's ideas, at least in the U.S. (Yes, that's reprehensible.) What's worse, patent applications are expensive. That means that very few in the Free Software world can actually get patents exclusively for Free Software.

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