I like to think that if things were explained in simple enough terms, judges would understand and it would have to go forward. This feels like a 'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington' quantity of optimism. Still, a guy can dream.
Surely the FSF has tried to argue this in court.. right?
Look at the RSA algorithm for example. As pure a mathematical beast as there ever was. Many folks wanted that formula opened up, but I don't know how many even got a fair hearing to argue about it. It held until it expired.
Obviously, they didn't try to patent the Chinese Remainder Theorem, or any other previously existing mathematical algorithm.
But, as the top-level comment and the original post point out,
> ...any method of manipulating information (i.e an algorithm) can be translated into a Haskell program, every Haskell function is a formula in the Typed Lambda Calculus, and all the variants of the Lambda Calculus are part of mathematics.
The RSA patent doesn't provide source code per se, but it definitely describes a particular algorithm which could be transcribed to lambda calculas.
> The RSA patent doesn't provide source code per se, but it definitely describes a particular algorithm which could be transcribed to lambda calculas.
Yes, but "transcribed to lambda calculus" does not imply that RSA isn't unpatentable any more than "can be translated to Japanese".
Note that you can't patent chemistry, molecules, or forces of nature either. However, no one confuses that with patenting the use of said things for specific applications.
Surely the FSF has tried to argue this in court.. right?