Z:gnu-www-ja-software-patents--2bd926-It was around 1990 that progra/en

It was around 1990 that programmers in the US started to become aware that they were faced with a danger from software patents. So i saw how the field worked before and how the field worked after. I saw no particular speed up in progress after 1990. There was no political debate in the US, but in Europe there has been a big political debate. Several years ago there was a push to amend the Munich treaty that established the  European Patent Office. It has a  clause saying that software is not patentable. The push was to amend that to start allowing software patents. But the community took notice of this. It was actually free software developers and free software users who took the lead.