Re:A patent lawsuit against GNOME
by akersten on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @03:30PM
(#21074396)
I think you're confusing the term "novel" with "impressive", "complicated", or "hard." Indisputably, there is software that checks those other boxes. But it's not novel.
Software is fundamentally a mechanism that maps inputs to outputs. We've had a similar mechanism for a while now, mathematics. And we decided that - as complicated as mathematical theory and equations can be, there is no justice making a particular instance of math a novel, patentable, encumbered creation. It's all a derivative of the concept of mathematical manipulation, same as all software is a manipulation of a state machine.
Saying "this particular combination of state transitions is novel" is non-sensical to me.
Software is fundamentally a mechanism that maps inputs to outputs. We've had a similar mechanism for a while now, mathematics. And we decided that - as complicated as mathematical theory and equations can be, there is no justice making a particular instance of math a novel, patentable, encumbered creation. It's all a derivative of the concept of mathematical manipulation, same as all software is a manipulation of a state machine.
Saying "this particular combination of state transitions is novel" is non-sensical to me.