innovation category archive

Jeremy Allison on Innovation and Patents

Jeremy Allison is fast becoming one of my heroes. Not only for the great technical work he has done with Samba, but also for his principled support of free software. He quit Novell in protest after they signed their patent pact with the devil, and he and the Samba team gave an early vote of support to GPL v3 by moving Samba to the new license soon after its release.

He also regularly contributes thoughtful essays to Tux Deluxe. I just found The Innovation Game in my feed reader, which has some positive points about innovation in free software, but also deals with a depressing subject, Microsoft and software patents:

So who could possibly be against this wealth of the commons? People wishing to own innovative ideas, that’s

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