Software patents should be abolished (Score 4, Insightful)

If software patents become widespread, I can easily imagine a situation where one violates 100 patents just to write an extremely trivial program. Computer software is a very evolutionary art form. Every program written owes a large debt to previous developments. We are fortunate that up until recently, almost all software innovation was done in a climate largely free of patents. I sometimes wonder what things would be like if Apple had won its patent fight with Microsoft over Windows.

I used to write software for a very large corporation. We were frequently encouraged to file patents for anything that we invented. We were rewarded even if our patent application was rejected. A successful patent application was a big deal. The corporation was quite sensibly trying to build up its portfolio of patents.

Eventually, you may have to work for some big corporation to write software. Only someone with a big software patent portfolio will be in a position to cross license with the other big players and thereby receive legal permission to use a basic set of key patents. I expressed this concern to a lawyer at Unisys, and his response was basically 'So what?'. He said that he thought that this had already happened in the chemical industry.

I guess that I was something of a crackpot to voice these views inside the big corporation where I worked. It was very encouraging to find out that the folks at the League for Programming Freedom(http://lpf.ai.mit.edu) share my reservations about software patents.