Patent advocates, large successful businesses, and politicians are so enthusiastic about the patenting of software that it’s hard to accept arguments from people like the FFII and Free Software Foundation who claim that the software industry simply does not need software patents and would be far better off without them.

German Parliament decided upon a joint motion to limit software patents urging the German Government to take steps to limit the granting of patents on computer programs. Software should exclusively be covered by copyright, and the rights of the copyright holders should not be devalued by third parties' software patents.

Seen in this light, free software and Creative Commons licenses can be viewed as a mechanism for seeding and preserving the common pool of knowledge, and ensuring the free exchange of ideas in a society that has become unduly acquisitive of ideas.

Does contributing your code to some FOSS project automatically give away your copyright on that code?

Over the last decade, free software developers have been repeatedly tempted by development tools that offer the ability to build free software more efficiently or powerfully.

"In cooperation with Digital Freedom, Free Culture @ NYU will be hosting the first American a screening of the 2007 film Good Copy Bad Copy. The documentary highlights the current state of copyright and culture, and features prominent copyright players such as Girl Talk, Lawrence Lessig, Renaldo Lemos, and Dan Glickman..."

FSF has now filed an amicus brief in Bilski, and they too ask the Supreme Court "to affirm that software ideas are not patentable":End Software Patents (ESP) executive director Ciaran O'Riordan explained, "Every software patent is a restriction on software developers and users of computers, and there are currently 200,000 software patents in the USA.

RMS: Thus, the Pirate Party's proposal would give proprietary software developers the use of GPL-covered source code after 5 years, but it would not give free software developers the use of proprietary source code, not after 5 years or even 50 years. The Free World would get the bad, but not the good.

The casual view of open source software is that the code always comes first: releases are made when the code is ready, new contributors prove their chops by the quality of their code, and so forth.