Siu-wai Leung and Dave Robertson - University of Edinburgh

Innovation Claims of FOSS: for Software Innovation and against Non-inventive Software Patents

This talk proposes the adoption of innovation claims for some Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) to promote software innovation and refute non-inventive software patents. We also show how our research on automated synthesis of conceptual models could help the implementation of innovation claims in FOSS repositories.

GNU/Linux together with other FOSS constitute the current Linux desktop and server distributions. While FOSS is getting support from more users and developers, they are facing tougher challenges, e.g., greater software functionality demands (in competition with well-packaged commercial software) and growing numbers of software patents. FOSS communities must collaborate to improve their product integration to gain more user support and find evidence to dispute the inventiveness of particular software patents. Our research in automated synthesis of conceptual models provides some automated facilities for conceptual integration of different FOSS. The conceptual models of a target software package (new or competitive products) serve as references for establishing/experimenting new FOSS integration projects. If the resulting automatically synthesised conceptual models are similar to target patents, the inventiveness of the target patents are obviously disputable.

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