discojesus - the ENTIRE point of patenting "Office/Excel/Spreashdeet/Word" processes and systems is to PREVENT open source alternatives to Word and Office.
We're talking about _patents_, not copyrights here. Nobody is suggesting that Software Copyrights aren't perfectly valid and an important part of the industry - without even having to Poll, I'm going to guess that 90% of HN residents are strong proponents of Software Copyrights. The Free-Software proponents, even those on the GPL V3 bandwagon, _rely_ on Copyrights to further their aims and ambitions.
We're talking about _patents_, not copyrights here. Nobody is suggesting that Software Copyrights aren't perfectly valid and an important part of the industry - without even having to Poll, I'm going to guess that 90% of HN residents are strong proponents of Software Copyrights. The Free-Software proponents, even those on the GPL V3 bandwagon, _rely_ on Copyrights to further their aims and ambitions.