In answer to Douglas Sorocco
See My February 24, 2005 Questions to USPTO On-Line, which may in part have prodded the USPTO and open source community into this latest action.
Failing direction from governmental legislation, software and other abstract method patents have been forced on the USPTO and the rest of the world by the back doors of legal and administrative precedent. How many countries have actually passed legislation explicitly legitimizing software or abstract patents? Not the USA for one.
Can the you point to any instances where the granting of software related patents has been an actual benefit to the progress of science, useful arts and the software industry in general? In a similar vein, can the you point to any instances where the granting of business method related patents has been an actual benefit to the progress of science, useful arts and industry in general? Have the intellectual property gurus even attempted to address the issues raised by the critics of software patents over the last two decades?
If no positive answer can be given to the above questions, why do we need to grant such monopolies?
Because of the time it takes to get a patent and the six to ten years it has taken to drag the first cases though the courts and appeals, the major negative effect of software patents have just begun to become noticeable. It is going to get a lot worse.
Because of the existing precedent, removing software patents will require the introduction of explicit legislation. That will take time, probably many years to undo the damage from the lobbying by intellectual monopoly advocates such as yourselves.
Until then, helping he USPTO track down prior art in publicly available open source software will greatly reduce the number of patents the software development industry will have to concern itself with.
Also opening up the patent application process could end up improving the quality the remaining granted patents.