Dear Readers, my name is Christian Selig. I am pupil in a German school. I have been programming for 9 years. Since 3 years, I exclusively work with free software. I am highly concerned by the European Union's plans to allow patents on software.
Software is in no way different from writing a book.
But I cannot see any reason why words, sentences, combinations thereof, writing styles etc. should be patentable. Software is built the same way, with different languages, different writing styles and different words. In the clearly non-independent study, which is written by an IP institute instead of an economics research institute, obvious mistakes have been made. This assumption is not wrong, it is stupid. On another point, most free software authors don't have any incentive to raise money from anyone for anything.