I think his notion about the open source community is dated by a few years and seems to be based on FSF = open source. A lot of open source projects are written

I think his notion about the open source community is dated by a few years and seems to be based on FSF = open source. A lot of open source projects are written now by companies that are anything but anarchistic. Open source simply becomes an end to consolidate subject matter experts across companies on a single project rather than each company inventing their own. eg cassandra , tornado , rails. Software innovation happens at a few different levels -> the math like algorithmic level, innovations in implementations, and business innovations. Allowing patents on algorithmic innovations would strongly chill the pace of innovation. Lastly as a person doing a startup - the upfront cost in terms of time and money for doing patent research would be pretty damaging. Would be interesting to hear from other startups on what they feel about this.