Give Stallman a Nobel Prize

Michael Tiemann thinks Richard Stallman deserves a Nobel Prize:

If Al Gore can win the Nobel Peace Prize for bringing the findings of the scientific community to the political forefront, perhaps Richard Stallman should be next in line for his early and tireless advocacy against Software Patents. And the sooner, the better.

By awarding the Nobel Prize for Economics to Leonid Hurwicz, Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson for their work on Mechanism Design Theory, they endorsed the fundamental thinking behind another inconvenient truth. Namely, that software patents may be greater deterrents to innovation than they are incentives, as they summarize in this paper:

…when discoveries are “sequential” (so that each successive invention builds in an essential way on its predecessors) patent protection is not as useful for encouraging innovation as in a static setting. Indeed, society and even inventors themselves may be better off without such protection. Furthermore, an inventor’s prospective profit may actually be enhanced by competition and imitation.

Which brings us now to a pressing question about today’s legal climate: as the concentration of software patents continues to rise, to the point where these patents now threaten the single most important innovation model known in the software world today–open source software–is it time for us to pay attention and do something about putting caps on these hazardous discharges?

Not only do software patents not help innovation, they actively harm it:

One thing is sure: when it comes to innovation the Linux community had been there and done that with the tux2 filesystem back in 2000, but fears over patent infringement led to abandonment of the that project in 2002. [...] what is perfectly clear in 2007 is that a potentially more innovative file system, tux2, never saw commercial use because of the fundamental dangers of any use of software patents. In this way, Stallman got it exactly right when he likened software patents to land mines — they do harm long after they are put into place.