Death to Software Patents

The following is an excerpt from an ongoing discussion at http://www.geeks-4-jesus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?id=282&p=1, I would suggest following the link and reading the entire post to get a gist of the whole conversation:

I would like to talk a moment strictly about programming.  What is a program really?  What does it do?  What we see of the program isn’t really what’s going on inside the computer.  The computer doesn’t think, “He selected Arial font, so change all the font to Arial,”  instead the computer is going through a bunch of

Code:

1 AND 1 = 1
1 OR 1 = 1
1 OR 0 = 0

and other various calculations on a binary level.  A bit of code is just a higher level language written for humans to easily understand, that eventually just gets translated into binary code and instructs the CPU to perform a specific set of calculations.  So in other words,

Code:

#include <iostream.h>

main()
{
    cout << "Hello World!";
    return 0;
}

is just an equation.  So that puts programs in the same category as E=mc².  Now we all know ( or at least should know ) who’s responsible for the above equation.  It’s one of the few that the masses are familiar with, but the point is, no one else claims to be responsible for E=mc² than Albert Einstein.  And yet his equation is used by many others to calculate other things.  It’s plugged in here and there throughout the scientific community to further scientific discovery.  If a computer program is essentially a set of calculations being performed by a computer, than why should it be any different?  Hiding your source code, patenting the software and forcing others to pay to use that code in another product to me is the same as Albert Einstein NOT publishing special and general relativity then requiring anyone who wants to use his ideas and equations to pay him royalties.  If you really sit down and evaluate the situation, this is not such a leap from where we are now.  I believe this is a dangerous place for the human race to be.  Think about the advances we’ve made in computer science in the past 20 years.  I can’t help but wonder how much further we could be if it wasn’t for this stupid patent system.

Don’t forget, this was just an excerpt from a larger, rather heated discussion.  So go to http://www.geeks-4-jesus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?id=282&p=1 to put your two cents in.