The Patent Puzzle
Patent fights are fights about money. The secondary issue, the one that makes the headlines, is control. To really understand what's going on in the current patent posturing involving Microsoft, Novell, and a host of open-source companies and groups, it helps to keep those factors firmly in mind.
What makes this current brewing battle particularly puzzling is that it is based on software patents. The naïve can confuse software patent issues with those of copyright and trademarks. Unlike copyright and trademarks, however, where one can point at the offending code or trademarked image or language, there is no such bright shining line in software patents.
The result? Bradley Kuhn, chief technology officer of the Software Freedom Law Center, explained in August 2004 (when he was executive director of the Free Software Foundation) when the issue of Linux and patents was first seriously considered, that it's "difficult today to write any software program—be it free software or proprietary—from scratch that does not exercise the teachings of some existing software patent in the U.S.A."
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