Here are some of my ideas for Fedora 8 and Fedora 9

[Les Mikesell]

Steve Searle wrote:
> Around 05:28pm on Sunday, July 08, 2007 (UK time), Les Mikesell scrawled:
> 
>> Which still leaves open the question of how many times you have to pay 
>> to license the same patent for the same device, or whether you can 
>> rearrange the bits in one licensed program?
> 
> Never!  As a user you do not buy a licence for the patent - you would
> only do that if you were going to manufacturei (code)  and distribute
> something that uses the patented process.  As a user you get a licence
> to run the software (and maybe do other things with it, e.g. the GNU
> licence).

That's the way it worked in the days before software (which you can 
represent as a large string of bits or a number) was allowed to be 
patented.  The argument for permitting software patents is that the 
software also represents a model of a process that could be covered when 
running.  My contention is that software is only in this covered state 
when actually running on a device (otherwise its just a big number) and 
that having any license to run the covered process on a particular 
device should absolve any obligations to the patent holder even if you 
modify that copy or replace it with different software that implements 
the same covered (and previously licensed) process.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com