BANGALORE: The bustling, overcrowded gullies of Sudarshan Layout’s slum settlement played host to a very high-profile visitor on Saturday afternoon. American software freedom activist, and founder of the GNU Project and Free Software Foundation Richard Matthew Stallman, fondly known as RMS, sat down to tea and interacted with children and volunteers at the Ambedkar Community Computing Centre.

... the different kinds of objections to software patents, including the point that there are only limited ways of thinking about programming, as Donald Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming shows.

...the practical benefits and harms of software patents, and spoke at length about the difference between legal protection of software in the form of patents and via copyright.

Software patents in India occupy a contentious and indeterminate legal space. While recent amendments to the Patent Act have sought to bring our law in conformity with WTO-mandated standards, these amendments have shied from pronouncing conclusively on the patentability of software.

“When students learn only proprietary software, they will qualify only as computer operators and never learn about using the nuts and bolts of the profession. This is one of the reasons why there are no innovative products that come out of this country,”

“Patenting is an expensive and tedious process. The challenge for every programmer would be to verify each time, to see if any two lines of his code would infringe upon a patent. In the U.S., a single verification can cost as much as $5,000. The fundamental issue is that if I arrive at anything independently, should I not use it only because someone had got it patented before me?”