graeme_p - 4:02 pm on Apr 15, 2009 (gmt 0)

Without patents there's nothing to protect us small fry developers from larger predators like Google and Microsoft, which was the point of the Stac Electronics patent suit that I pointed out.

How many patents do you hold? How many do IBM hold? Whose patent portfolio is harder to work around?

Add to that the cross licensing by the giants, that means that they pay nothing to each other, but new entrants have to pay all of them - especially in fields like semiconductors.

Has software progressed any faster since it became patentable? As far as I can see, most of the important ideas existed in some for before that.

Web services and even software distributed in binary form can be kept a trade secret, and the creator has a copyright. Are patents really necessary on top of that?

Then there is the risk every developer faces of unknowingly infringing, and finding out after committing to a technology. This is made worse by patent trolls with submarine patents.