That's a counterfactual; we don't know what would have happened if patenting RSA wasn't possible in at least one country (it wasn't patented in most of the world). Would its discoverers have published it anyway? Would their publication be known to the creators of the SSL protocol? Would the SSL creators have used a different system if they didn't know of RSA?
The John Nash example tells us nothing, since it was from 30 years earlier (missing the demand from the Web), and he did have the option (which it seems he didn't use) to publish his discovery for the wider public.
And there's independent discovery. RSA had already been independently discovered at least once; we don't know how long it would take until it was independently discovered again, if it hadn't been published that time.
I do remember that the RSA patents were one factor which held back wider adoption of public key encryption; people were anxiously waiting for it to be freed, to the point of scheduling parties for the day the patents expired (only for it to be messed up by the patents being freed a few days earlier).
So using RSA to argue for or against software patents is not a simple matter. But my point was not to argue for or against software patents; what I wanted to know how is how come I always hear that math is not patentable in the USA, yet clearly mathematical algorithms are patented there all the time.
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That's a counterfactual; we don't know what would have happened if patenting RSA wasn't possible in at least one country (it wasn't patented in most of the world). Would its discoverers have published it anyway? Would their publication be known to the creators of the SSL protocol? Would the SSL creators have used a different system if they didn't know of RSA?
The John Nash example tells us nothing, since it was from 30 years earlier (missing the demand from the Web), and he did have the option (which it seems he didn't use) to publish his discovery for the wider public.
And there's independent discovery. RSA had already been independently discovered at least once; we don't know how long it would take until it was independently discovered again, if it hadn't been published that time.
I do remember that the RSA patents were one factor which held back wider adoption of public key encryption; people were anxiously waiting for it to be freed, to the point of scheduling parties for the day the patents expired (only for it to be messed up by the patents being freed a few days earlier).
So using RSA to argue for or against software patents is not a simple matter. But my point was not to argue for or against software patents; what I wanted to know how is how come I always hear that math is not patentable in the USA, yet clearly mathematical algorithms are patented there all the time.