Eben Moglen Patent Quotations

IBM has decided that being a company committed to open standards, open document formats and free software means ultimately reassessing the patent process and its role in your relationship to your customers,

Patents which conserve an edge in a rapidly changing market, may have uses for companies such as IBM. But patents which inhibit your customer's ability to achieve their own goals or to contribute to jointly build technology or community build technology are not useful to a company such as IBM wishes to be.

No matter what your stand on software patents, and I oppose them, I call on developers to contribute to the OSDL patent commons project because there is strength in numbers and when individual contributions are collected together it creates a protective haven where developers can innovate without fear.

Mr. Stallman made perfectly clear that his point of view is: It's enough. It's enough that the world has to pay attention to that (DRM) problem the way the world needed to pay attention to the patent problem 10 years ago.