The whole thing is nuts. I can’t understand why our goverment allows this shit to go on. It’s wrong and its bad for society to have this cancer growing inside our economy.
I love it when a non-technical (in the IT sense), non-developer, non-opensource person gets angry about software patents. Around the IT world, you’ll get plenty of passionate tirades against software patents (I’ve had a few words on the topic myself), but rarely does it cross into the business arena so spectacularly as this post from New York venture capitalist Fred Wilson (who is not exactly a technology neophyte, of course, having invested in a lot of tech start-ups).
Hopefully this spleen-vent from outside the developer echo chamber will get some attention … there is now sufficient evidence that AT BEST software patents provide a company a level of protection against patent trolling (via the “mutually-assured destruction” principle), but at worst they are a significant impediment to software innovation where smaller players (where innovation generally happens) are at the mercy of vague and generalised patents awarded by a naive, under-informed and (to be fair) poorly-equipped Patents Office who don’t have the time, resources and possibly inclination to discover the at-times obvious “prior art” that would invalidate the patent.