Quite the contrary. The millionaire knows he can take any idea he wants from a young upstart if it's not patented. He can hire more people, spend more money mar

Quite the contrary. The millionaire knows he can take any idea he wants from a young upstart if it's not patented. He can hire more people, spend more money marketing his clone, get the big PR firm working for him, and relegate the true innovator to a historical footnote (at best). If there's a patent, the force of law can be leveraged by the upstart to protect himself from such incursions, at least theoretically, and it requires expensive, tedious effort for the millionaire to circumvent the patent and/or defend himself against claims that he has infringed. Even if most inventors aren't going to pursue this course, the fact that the possibility exists is a deterrent. Patents are not necessarily done well, but like many systems that have been co-opted by large corporate interests, they exist precisely to prevent such exploitation. Software people must understand that software is not very hard or expensive to replicate. You don't get acquired because your software is good. You get acquired because you have a brand, an audience, a trademark, or a patent. There has to be some asset that the prospective acquirer cannot easily recreate by throwing 3-5 coders into a dark closet for a year or two (this costs around $1M / yr, much cheaper than any newsworthy acquisition). So yeah, millionaires are likely to be very irritated that there's a patent that may force them to compensate the original innovator, or worse, buy their company entirely.