>Sadly, some of them profit (immensely) from putting up that huge barrier for smaller companies to compete with them. Patents go both ways. Studies that while

>Sadly, some of them profit (immensely) from putting up that huge barrier for smaller companies to compete with them. Patents go both ways. Studies that while patent thickets may discourage entry [1], this effect is limited, and smaller companies are more likely to enter the same markets (and succeed) if they have patents themselves [1, 2, 3, 4]. > Oracle gets to claim $9B for 37 methods in the Android code. This has nothing to do patents and everything to do with copyright licenses like the GPL. And just to be pedantic, it's 37 whole packages. And without this, Google would have been rip off Sun's hard work of building a developer base for Java. "Free software" should not mean "freeloading". > Apple gets to sue Samsung over icons, among other things. And without those, as ridiculous as they are, Samsung would have gotten away with ripping off Apple wholesale. > Being Open Source friendly isn't about releasing code under liberal licenses. It is about the commitment to software freedom. False dichotomy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11583749 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11583749 1. http://people.bu.edu/cockburn/cockburn_macgarvie_entry_and_patenting_in_software.pdf http://people.bu.edu/cockburn/cockburn_macgarvie_entry_and_p... 2. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=510103 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=510103 3. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=989592 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=989592 4. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=926204 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=926204