Monday, February 21, 2005

These days people are talking about software patents.

In my opinion, patents are fine. Patents make companies want to invest on R&D, like Microsoft, which invested, if I'm not wrong, 6 billion dollars last year. Well, that's not a nice example because I meant patents in general, not software patents.

But is software patentable? Well, actually it is (in some countries, at least), it's a fact, so I'll change the question: Should software be patentable?

I would say "Yes", but carefully. Some very high complex methodologies should be patentable, like image compression algorythms or indexing techniques for huge databases. But not natural evolution of technology.

This is a good example of what I understand for "natural evolution of technology". You can't get the user log of a web server, index it, add a couple fields and say that's patentable.

Not in my opinion, at least.