For a judge who served on the court that "opened the floodgates for software patents," this guy knows remarkably little about software. He (self-admitting) doesn't even know anything about the software industry or its current disregard for patents. How can we take any of his comments seriously? The interviewers did ask some thoughtful questions, but I wish the interviewers would have mentioned that the current approach in the industry uses terms like Mutually Assured Destruction.
"If software is less dependent on patents, fine then. Let software use patents less as they choose," Michel said.
"Yeah, if countries didn't like the negative impacts of nuclear bombs, they shouldn't have produced so many during and after World War II." The problem is it only takes one Nazi Germany to scare a country into producing such a thing before the other, and one Stalinist Soviet Union to scare them into continuing to produce them. That's the problem with the software patents - everyone has to arm themselves against everyone else who isn't looking out for the good of the software industry. History may judge nuclear weapons as a great human mistake, and I suspect software patents also. Besides, software patents were NOT allowed to be patented before the Federal Circuit. It's not like that situation is without precedent.
Old programmers never die, they just hit account block limit.