Congratulations. You found legitimate criticisms of the viewpoints
expressed in the article I cited. But I wouldn't go as far as to call the
arguments in that article "absurd."
For example, there is nothing
inherent in FOSS that requires
by law the reuse of
code or the
high-quality debugging of interfaces. (Is the GNU
Lesser General Public
License is an attempt to handle this problem?)
On the other hand, the
patenting of a software interface could
increase software quality for
the reasons given in the article. Perhaps more is
needed, but providing for
such patents might be a worthy start. Every long
journey begins with a single
step, after all.
In any event, if the Duke University Law Review article I
cited does
nothing else, it certainly cites enough sources to convince me that
software
quality control is a problem for which there is no obvious solution.
Any
computer program that solves that problem is a worthy invention
that ought to be patentable in and of itself.
So by blatant assertion, I
have proven the proposed general rule that
"software should not be patentable
subject matter" false by providing a
counterexample.
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