Mr. Belvedere used our news submit to tell us, Unlike in America, software in Europe cannot be patented. This is set to change if the European Parliament is to adopt the so-called 'software patents' in Europe. If this goes ahead, it will affect some open source developers severely, such as Wine for Linux that enables Windows software to run in Linux. Even Linux itself may be affected as it may have to pay the "patent holders" for trivial things such as its Progress bars, scroll bars and so on.
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Software patents are already in place in America and as far as I am aware of, I have not heard of any major problems with them there. As Europe has not had to deal with software patents so far, it will something new to look out for. With about 30,000 patents granted by European Patent Office (EPO), openly since 1998, it will likely affect quite a number of software development companies.
A detailed website about Software Patents in Europe can be read at: http://swpat.ffii.org/index.en.html
Source: Slashdot.org
