Stuart Gathman

Authored Comments

"It simply is not feasible for a company to review and clear the field of potentially relevant patents when launching a new technology venture in these sectors."

Hence, software patents are not only harmful but useless. In other fields, a company willingly searches relevant patents because licensing is generally cheaper than reinventing.

Explicitly prohibited (software is math) by law, software patents exist only due to tortured case law built on pre-Gödelian mathematical ignorance.

Summary of the discussion:
1) With linux it is possible, but not at all necessary, to manually compile from source
2) Manually compiling from source requires technical expertise, and is therefore hard.
3) Access to source is a standard feature of linux. Since a standard feature of linux is hard, linux is hard.
4) On Windows, it is not possible to compile from source without a source license. While compiling from source on Windows is also hard, it is not a standard feature, therefore Windows is easy.