It is nice to think that all patents are supposed to bring something into public knowledge that would otherwise have remain hidden but I don't think that is the

It is nice to think that all patents are supposed to bring something into public knowledge that would otherwise have remain hidden but I don't think that is their real purpose. It seems to me that the contract is that the state will protect your invention precisely because if they didn't, it would be easily copyable and therefore you would not have put effort into inventing it. Things that can be kept secret don't really need patent protection at all, you just keep them secret. Whenever I try and reason about patents, I think of the development of the steam engine. Patents seem to have been developed for that time period and that kind of invention. Anyone can look at a steam engine and understand how all of the parts work. When someone came up with a clever way of solving a problem, making a better steam engine, anyone could have easily seen what they did and made their own version. Patents protected the inventor and allowed him to recoup his R&D expenses. So when you look at the evolution of the steam engine you see places where people licensed patents from previous inventors and places where they came up with different (often less efficient) solutions to previously solved problems because the previous solution was patented. I think that this is an example of the patent system working well. Steam engines evolved rapidly and inventors were able to continue inventing because they could make money off of their ideas. The question now is how appropriate are patents in software, a field that is very very different from the mechanical nuts and bolts field that they were created for. I don't know the answer to that question, but it is shitty for small players to be in constant fear of the big guys.