Richard Stallman -- The Anatomy of a Trivial Patent Patents6/12/2000; 7:33:43 AM I missed this story while I was gone, but I think this article is vital for a non-technical person to understand why the techies get all upset about how obvious ideas are being patented. Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation and highly respected spokesperson for the Free Software movement (a subset of the Open Source movement that concentrates on freedom and not just free-in-price).Just to clarify, when you see something in the article like this:

using a computer, a computer display and a telecommunications link between the remote user's computer and the network web site,

This says they are using a server on a network.Please take my word for it when I say that what Richard Stallman says is no more and no less then what the patent says. He's not summarizing the claims, he's re-phrasing them.