Last week the Federal Circuit issued a major decision, In re Bilski, concerning the subject matter limits of patent law. The case presented questions relating to software patents, an issue of great significance to the free and open source software community, and so Red Hat filed a brief in Bilski to educate the appeals court about FOSS and its problems with the software patents. In the new opinion, the court cited Red Hat’s brief, but declined to settle the issue of when, if ever, software based inventions should be patentable. Even so, the new test in Bilski will probably limit the patentability of software. The war is not over, but the odds of success for FOSS just got better.

This entry was posted by Colin Dodd on Monday, November 3rd, 2008 at 3:59 pm and is filed under Truth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Bilski And Software Patents – Good News for FOSS

by Colin Dodd

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