Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project
"How to fight software patents - singly and together", Newsforge (9 September 2004)
2000s
Keynote Speech at FOSDEM 2007: Liberating Java http://ftp.belnet.be/mirrors/FOSDEM/2007/FOSDEM2007-Liberating-Java.ogg
Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project
"How to fight software patents - singly and together", Newsforge (9 September 2004)
2000s
Nathaniel Borenstein (1957) American computer scientist
[Borenstein, Nathaniel S., Programming as if people mattered : friendly programs, software engineering, and other noble delusions, 1991, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 9780691087528, 53, 4. print.]
Attributed
John D. Carmack (1970) American computer programmer, engineer, and businessman
On software patents, Quoted in "John Carmack: Knee Deep in the Voodoo" http://web.archive.org/web/20010624154450/http://www.voodooextreme.com/games/interviews/carmack/ Voodoo Extreme(2000-11-11)
Cory Doctorow (1971) Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author
"Why Samsung's Galaxy Tab is 'meh'" in The Guardian (25 July 2011) http://theguardian.com/technology/2011/jul/25/why-samsung-galaxy-tab-is-meh
Eric Maskin (1950) American Nobel laureate in economics
Bessen, James, and Eric Maskin. " Sequential innovation, patents, and imitation http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/indprop/docs/comp/replies/appendix1_en.pdf." The RAND Journal of Economics, 40.4 (2009): p. 611.
Jamie Zawinski (1968) American programmer
JWZ
http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html
Groupware.
Lawrence Lessig (1961) American academic, political activist.
"Code + Law: An Interview with Lawrence Lessig" at O'Reilly P2P (29 January 2001)(29 January 2001)
Context: Our problem is that lawyers have taught us that there is only one kind of economic market for innovation out there and it is this kind of isolated inventor who comes up with an idea and then needs to be protected. That is a good picture of maybe what pharmaceutical industry does. It's a bad picture of what goes on, for example, in the context of software development, in particular. In the context of software development, where you have sequential and complementary developments, patents create an extraordinarily damaging influence on innovation and on the process of developing and bringing new ideas to market. So the particular mistake that lawyers have compounded is the unwillingness to discriminate among different kinds of innovation.
We really need to think quite pragmatically about whether intellectual property is helping or hurting, and if you can't show it's going to help, then there is no reason to issue this government-backed monopoly.
Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)
California Legislature Stunned By Invasion Of Armed "Black Panthers" https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2202&dat=19670503&id=ClcmAAAAIBAJ&sjid=ZP8FAAAAIBAJ&pg=1072,5010951&hl=en, Gettysburg Times (3 May 1967) <br class="br">1960s
“Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”
Jonas Salk (1914–1995) Inventor of polio vaccine
CBS Television interview, on See It Now (12 April 1955); quoted in Shots in the Dark : The Wayward Search for an AIDS Vaccine (2001) by Jon Cohen
Context: Edward R. Murrow: Who owns the patent on this vaccine?
Jonas Salk: Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?
Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo
Source: Magic Bites