From: Billy Brown (bbrown@transcient.com)
Date: Tue Jan 25 2000 - 15:40:28 MST
Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> A large percentage of the people on this list are software developers.
> I suspect there are several hundred years experience in the field (I
> account for about 20 of them). Does anyone here really think that
> investment in software companies is due to software patents? I doubt
> it strongly. Software patents are sand in the gears of progress, not
> grease. I think even supporters or agnostics to the idea would agree
> that they played little or no positive role in the industry.
Agreed. You don't need patent protection to make writing software
profitable (or even wildly, obscenely profitable). You don't even need full
copyright protection. As long as your competitors are prohibited from
copying and reselling your work as if it were there own, you're in good
shape. I know of no case in which software patents have done anything but
retard progress.
E. William Brown V, MCSE+I, MCSD
bbrown@transcient.com
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