Red Hat's chief executive, Matthew Szulik, had some harsh words to say about patents at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco: "In the last 30 years, we've continued to see patents really being a challenge to innovation. The industry moves much faster than a remedy process. There is very little empirical evidence that builds a correlation between patents and innovation," he told several hundred attendees. While he said that Red Hat does apply for software patents, he said it plans to use them only defensively. What's the solution? He is proposing a better searchable database, a "cleaner distinction between patents and trade secrets" and a shorter review process for assigning patents, Silicon.com reports.

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