Software patents are more harmful than useful

email interview with Michael Widenius, Moderator of MySQL, the award winning and leading Web database by TCX (Sweden)

Q: Are software patents good for your business ?

Software patents for MAJOR WORK are good for business, but they should not last for more than at maximum 2-3 years ! With major work, I mean something that can't be done by a single individual within 50 years! As the software industry is moving and changing at a great speed all software users (and finally the software companies) will lose if software patents lasts too long!  Users want to use the same interface and methods to store things with different programs even when time changes and if a patent makes this impossible this will not benefit anyone in the long run! I can't see anything more terrible if for example word processors would have to store documents differently because other has a copyright on some specific format!

Q: Are software patents good for the community ?

No, software patents are more harmful than useful for the community.  The major problem is that the people that give patents, doesn't have any insight into what is easy and what is hard and because of this most software patents are given for things that trivial things.  The total outcome is that software patents makes problems for the whole software industry and only the companies that already have a lot of money can afford to go on!

Q: What should the EU patent law should state regarding software, algorithms, user interfaces, standards, interoperability, etc. ?

There should be no patents for any software ideas, user interfaces, standards or interoperability.  The current copyright laws for the actual software code are good enough!