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Our Bureau

Hyderabad , Feb. 10

SOFTWARE patents are detrimental to the interest of both software development and developers and could, in fact, retard innovation and meaningful usage. Governments should enact laws that help people share software, according to Dr Richard Stallman, Chairman of Free Software Foundation (FSF).

The open source evangelist, who was in Hyderabad to inaugurate a Web site that voices viewsagainst the Patents Bill, said software patents would have an adverse influence on the spread of technology. Politicians, who are not programmers, often believe that patent Bills are in the interest of development, but that is not the case.

Comparing software patents to musical notes, Dr Stallman said, "it was impossible to protect musical notes. Opinion polls among software professionals and associations show that majority of them (over 80 per cent) were in favour of sharing software and against patent laws."

FSF India is a registered non-profit company working to promote the use of free software in India, which the foundation describes as `Swatantra.' This is particularly targeted at educational institutions, schools, the Government and public bodies.

As a part of its localisation drive, the FSF GNU/Linux Telugu software was released. FSF is working on a host of initiatives in the country in itsquest to popularise the Swatantra software.

It is addressing issues such as localisation, digital encoding, content development, new standards and the drive to popularise usage of open source software in schools.

FSF is also working with various organisations, including Technology Development for Indian Languages (TDIL) of the Ministry of Information Technology.

It has managed to create solutions using a standard unicode and open type font encoding, so that multi-lingual computing can become a reality and happen seamlessly for users anywhere.

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