"Are software patents useful? That's pretty clearly not the case. Software patents are clearly a problem," Torvalds said at the OSDL Linux Summit here. Torvalds wasn't alone in his opinion. He was joined in a panel discussion by Brian Behlendorf, a co-founder of the Apache Web server software, and Mitch Kapor, chairman of the Mozilla foundation and the Open Source Applications Foundation. Behlendorf said the way to rebut the argument that software patents provide an incentive for innovation and research investment is to imagine the world without them. Read on at ZdNet