15 ms·

The Rise and Fall of the Independent Developer

143 points by sant0sk1 15y ago

samyzee 15y ago
i say fuck the legal patenting system...if you really want to make something....just GO AHEAD AND MAKE IT!!..fuck em all!!
- rbarooah 15y ago
  Is that what you'd advise people to say to the judge?
  - samyzee 15y ago
    What I am saying is that on that you dont want to think about what you will say to the judge even before building your product....if your product was really that successful tht you got patent trolled you will probably have the money to hire a lawyer to represent you.
    - rbarooah 15y ago
      I agree that we shouldn't stop building stuff because of this worry. Sadly we know by example that not everyone who gets hit by trolls has money for a defense.
- geebee 15y ago
  Here's the problem: how do you feel about essentially donating your time and creative energy to patent trolls and defense lawyers? If at least there were some kind of public good, I could almost stomach it, but to see these vultures take away the benefits of my hard work, it would be incredibly painful. What makes this worse is that it almost seems to be a kind of roulette... but then again, that is a design feature rather than a flaw from the pov of the trolls. After all, if patents were easy to understand and predictable, people could easily see what is patented legitimately and what isn't, and sidestep the minefield. The system needs to be essentially random, opaque, and unpredictable to keep the industry stocked with fresh meat.
  - technomancy 15y ago
    Seems like incorporating your company outside the US sidesteps a good portion of this danger. The more articles I read, the more appealing this is to me, were I ever to go into business for myself.
    - bergie 15y ago
      Yep, life as a developer in Europe is a lot less problematic, even though pay can be lower. Of course the potential downside is that a patent troll can still block your sales to USA, or even get you into the situation where you can't travel to the country. Small risk to take in exchange for creative freedom, I think.
  - samyzee 15y ago
    exactly....the current system was not built keeping software innovation in mind!!
    - rbarooah 15y ago
      Right, but is legal martyrdom going to change things?
- maukdaddy 15y ago
  Hopefully you are never involved in any legal dispute, because the discovery process is going to be hilarious when this comment turns up.
  - samyzee 15y ago
    yeah the audience is going to burst in applause when the prosecution reads out this comment.
    - rbanffy 15y ago
      If you ever end up in court for patent litigation, drop me a message. I'll be there to applaud you when the plaintiff lawyer reads it.
- handrake 15y ago
  well the best way to do this would fix the current situation with patent reform...
- samyzee 15y ago
  a) whenever i comment on something on the internet I do not want to think about what legal implications it might have for a hypothetical legal dispute tht I might get involved in the future b) We are assuming that the prosecution will be smart enough to figure out that samyzee on hacker news is in fact me. c) To Hacker News: Please add a feature that lets me delete my comments!!
felipemnoa 15y ago
If it were easy, everybody would be doing it. It does suck that now independent developers have to also worry about patent litigation. However, it will not stop the most resolved developers from continuing forward. On the bright side, patent trolls are patenting the most obvious patents right now. In 20-30 years all of those patent will expire. I'll be amazed if 20 years from now we will still continue to patent obvious things like one click button transactions. If so, we all deserve to go down the ship of financial failure since it is us, society, that allows such things. Meanwhile, if we could only find the best ways to make patent trolls' lives more painful... At least it would dissuade the casual patent troll.
- rbarooah 15y ago
  The implication is that products for which there is a demand won't come to market. It might not be easy, but society is harmed if we make it artificially harder to respond to market demand.
  - felipemnoa 15y ago
    I understand, but unfortunately short term (like next year) is hard to change that (or maybe we can we just haven't figured it out). It is still better to continue moving forward, we'll figure something out along the way.
    - rbarooah 15y ago
      What do you mean by 'moving forward', and what do you expect to happen that's going to change things in the longer term?
      - felipemnoa 15y ago
        I mean don't just give up. I don't know what will change, but things have a way to work themselves up if one continues to hammer at the problem. There will always be issues when trying to do something important. This is just another one. And as I write this I realize that I sound a bit corny. The shame... (no sarcasm intended)
programminggeek 15y ago
All businesses have risk. Even if you are an indie one man shop you are in fact a business and there are risks. Same thing goes for being a lawyer or accountant or contractor. If you screw up, it could cost you financially in a very big way, even if you didn't intend to do anything wrong. Even successful businesses can crumble, even billion dollar businesses can get beat up by litigation to the point it isn't even worth continuing. To say that the sky is falling for indie devs is a bit silly. There are plenty of places you can build, innovate, distribute, and succeed. Sure, the iTunes App Store thing is big today, or maybe Facebook, or maybe Steam, or maybe Wii's downloadable channel, it doesn't matter. Any one of those could be gone in a year or two. Here's an example, there are people out there who make millions of dollars selling e-books and mediocre/overpriced software on Clickbank right now. Some of those people get sued I'm sure for their products. More people show up. You could take the same ebook and sell it on Kindle or Nook if you got shut down or you could sell your software on the Mac App Store or Chrome Web Store if CB went under. There are so many platforms to distribute and build software and businesses on now, it really is hard to complain about the death of the indie developer because there are so many new companies getting started every day on all these different platforms that didn't exist even 5 years ago. As a business owner you can't control all risk, but you certainly can and should plan around them. If one channel gets shut down, move on to a different one or a different product. Great devs and great companies aren't built on one hit one time wonders.
- rbarooah 15y ago
  Nothing you say here seems to contradict the author's position that the patent situation is making things worse for indie devs.
  - ignifero 15y ago
    But that situation is not anywhere near impossible. What's more, the patent system is there to serve a purpose, innovation, even (and especially) for the indie developers. Now, if that purpose is not served, which seems to be the case for software, it's time to lobby for governments to interfere, not to give up on independent entrepreneurship.
hxf148 15y ago
Our startup (http://infostripe.com http://infostripe.com) is built on independent spirit. So far we have been doing well. It's a struggle sometimes but always worth the effort.
- bretthopper 15y ago
  Every comment you've made has a link to your startup in it. There's a difference between self promotion and spam.
  - hxf148 15y ago
    It's true, I do mention my startup a lot. It's just that we are a small (aka unfunded) startup with lots of dev and little marketing.. when I see an article that is relevant and I have a thought on it I link to try and reach out. I don't have much time to really get into comments as I'd like. I read a lot though. I will try and find other ways to contribute.
benihana 15y ago
It's really hard to want to continue reading when the third sentence says this: Little has changed with the process of software development since the 1980’s I understand the point: that things are the more the same than ever, that this guy is a salty old sonofabitch who's forgotten more than i've learned, but seriously. Little has changed with the process of software development since the 1980s other than the tools? The entire way we think about why we're building software and what we're trying to get out of has changed and is still changing.
mkn 15y ago
In the days where software was distributed on magnetic media, such as reels of tape, cassettes, or floppy disks, it cost a lot of money to get the product to a customer. One of us is misremembering. I seem to recall an interview with Gates and/or Ballmer where they talked about the realization that the cost of 5 or 6 floppies at wholesale was insignificant compared to the revenue from the software, that it was a no-brainer cost-wise. CDs were the first time when cost became an issue, iirc (again) because you had to pay for one or more masters to print the production copies. I'd feel better if his history was right. This time the retail channel itself is very cheap, but the ancillary costs, both financially and emotionally, are very high. And, of course, only large companies and publishers can bear these costs. My fear is that It’s only a matter of time before developers find the risks and expenses prohibitive and retreat to the safety of a larger organization. We’ll be going back to square one. I can't even address the "emotional costs" he talks about, but there is a precedent for dealing with risks of this kind. For consulting engineers, it's called "errors and omissions insurance." It strikes me that if there isn't something like that for developers, one plausible reason is that this kind of liability hasn't actually been a problem. Is there errors and omissions insurance for developers? From our experience, it’s entirely possible that all the revenue for a product can be eaten up by legal fees. The author uses the phrase "from our experience," but I wonder what that experience actually is. At this point, it's not even anecdotal, because he doesn't supply the anecdote! We can't even begin to ask if his experience generalizes. For example, did he get good counsel? Was he actually infringing? Should he have settled? Did he avail himself of the FSF or ESF if applicable? Should his product have been more profitable? I think I'm either blessed or cursed with too much curiosity to take this guy at his word.
- allwein 15y ago
  >One of us is misremembering. I seem to recall an interview with Gates and/or Ballmer where they talked about the realization that the cost of 5 or 6 floppies at wholesale was insignificant ... I'd feel better if his history was right. Sure, the cost of delivering a single copy of software to a given customer was relatively inexpensive. But Craig is talking about how, in the absence of the internet or other easy customer acquisition and distribution methods, the way you used to get your software to customers was by making thousands of physical copies, boxing them up in a nice shiny box with manuals, and have computer software and electronics stores display your software on their physical store shelves. And that's quite a bite of money to have tied up in inventory even though a single piece of media itself was relatively inexpensive.
bugsy 15y ago
He's got his history completely wrong. From the first days that home computers were affordable at all, there were tons of very small software shops. I recall purchasing programs from computer stores that came in poly bags containing a photocopied manual on card stock and a cassette tape with a photocopied label that had been glued on by hand. If you called the company for support, sometimes you woke the guy up.
endlessvoid94 15y ago
Unrelated, but interesting nonetheless: the current software industry has a strikingly similar feel to the early texas oil prospecting days. Independents are suddenly able to take a little bit of risk, take on some money (then: banks, now: angels and VCs), and work by themselves or in small teams to produce something that lots of people need (then: oil, now: good software). Some of the biggest fortunes in history were made back then (1900 - 1930s), just as some of the biggest fortunes are now being made in this industry. The digger I deep (no pun intended), the more similar these two stages of history look alike. I'm sure there are other eras that also share these common threads.
noonespecial 15y ago
The sad reality is that if you make something of value, there are rotten people who will come and try to steal from you. The author thinks he's discovered something new. I don't think he has. "Patent trolling" might be a bit of a new angle but business has always been risky. In some parts of the world, if you farm a little too much, gangs come by in rusty toyotas with AK47's and help themselves (and might kidnap your children for good measure). In our society, we've allowed these men to wear suits and pretend they are contributing members and in exchange, they no longer use guns. This seems like a valid compromise until we as a society outgrow this sort of behavior. (Here's hoping) There are tools for managing risk. Create an LLC and have professional liability insurance. Sure bad stuff can happen. I had an over-zealous zoning official try to revoke the business license for my house because I was "manufacturing" software (and manufacturing is zoned industrial, donchaknow). I wish there weren't patent trolls, but at some point you have to admit that you can't spend your life worrying about all of the bad stuff that could happen. Take a few reasonable precautions and then do your thing.
- rbarooah 15y ago
  Neither an LLC nor liability insurance will stop your business being destroyed and years of your life being wasted if a troll decides to target you. Would you suggest an LLC for each product so that they can only be attacked individually?
  - noonespecial 15y ago
    Actually, if they are suitably different, yes. It has the added benefit of making it easy to sell the product/business down the road or convert to a different kind of Corp to get investors. If a product is good enough to make money on it's own, it's good enough for its own LLC.
- ww520 15y ago
  OT: Is LLC better than C-Corp or S-Corp in CA? Isn't LLC mostly for real estate holding? What I have been doing is having a parent C-Corp and using DBA for individual product/company under it. I wonder whether I should switch to LLC.
onan_barbarian 15y ago
One of the issues here that wasn't mentioned, facing independent developers, is the almost pathological tendency of some people/groups in the F/OSS community to clone any even mildly successful product for no particular reason. I'm a big fan of free and open source software (especially when it's genuinely new or fills an actual gap, like the GNU tools and Linux), but there are times I wonder whether there are a lot of vested interests out there who would like to drive the cost of software to zero and make us all work for a wage providing 'services'. There are entire categories of software now where people are now conditioned only to accept an open source product. Can you imagine anyone building a new computer language now, commercially? If it was even vaguely successful it would be cloned and forked so quickly it'd make your head spin. Between the ideologues like Stallman, who effectively think it's immoral to make money off selling the software itself (I know his position is supposedly more nuanced than that, but free software effectively amounts to this if you have to hand out source to all and sundry) and the open-source-friendly companies like IBM and Google - who have every reason to drive the $$$ available off software to zero, it's easy to feel a bit beleaguered.
- rbarooah 15y ago
  I couldn't agree more. People sometimes seem to clone stuff because they think they're 'sticking it to the man', when in fact they can only do this because they work for a corporation during the day. And the 'man' they are sticking it to is actually an indie dev trying to get out of wage slavery. I think open source is clearly critical to the modern software ecology, but I wish people would think carefully about why they are doing it in each case, rather than assuming their actions are automatically benign because of a sprinkling of 'open' dust.
- mellis 15y ago
  But there is a reason: to provide a free / open-source version of a useful and successful product. This software commons may lower the value of competing commercial products but it provides value to everyone else (who can use and build on it without cost or permission).
  - rbarooah 15y ago
daimyoyo 15y ago
What I'd like to see is a collective legal fund to protect devs from patent trolls. Like insurance, everyone pays into the system and if you need representation, high quality lawyers would be there for you. That seems to me to be the best solution to this problem short of abolishing software patents altogether.
- rbarooah 15y ago
  I like they idea, but I don't see how it reduces the risk. If someone has a valid patent, you're still in trouble.
  - dhess 15y ago
    An independent developers' patent pool, then.
    - rbarooah 15y ago
      Patent pools are no defense against trolls.
      - dhess 15y ago
        Fair point.
  - tomjen3 15y ago
    No, you just have to make sure they understand that a lawsuit against you ends with a verdict from the supreme court after a long and costly legal battle.
zentechen 15y ago
Should move the corporate to China and clone the heck out of everything. Facebook -> RenRen Twitter -> Weibo YouTube -> Tudou Google -> Baidu Flickr -> YuPoo See http://www.randomwire.com/chinese-web-20-clones http://www.randomwire.com/chinese-web-20-clones Yeah, Trolls, go ahead and sue them.
rbarooah 15y ago
Does anyone think that a legislation preventing NPE's from suing for patent infringement would be practical? They'd still be able to hold them - just not sue. It seems like something that large corporations as well as independents could get behind.
- wtracy 15y ago
  How do you prove that an organization is an NPE? All they have to do is hire a couple of college kids dirt cheap and they can show that they are "developing" a product. Denying patent protection to anyone who doesn't already have a finished product out on the market opens a whole new can of worms.
  - rbarooah 15y ago
    The law already deals with vague definitions. It really wouldn't be too hard to write something that erred on the side of making it somewhat hard to prove that you were practicing.
soitgoes 15y ago
Does anyone have any statistics about the number of independent developers / startups that suffer a significant negative financial impact because of a patent infringement lawsuit? My gut feeling is that it's a very small percentage. A few years ago, I think Paul Graham wrote an article suggesting startups shouldn't worry about being sued because in practice it rarely happens to them.
danssig 15y ago
Well, the good thing about it is maybe this will force a "Silicon Valley" to finally appear in Europe where the odds aren't stacked so badly against the little guy.
sreitshamer 15y ago
I wonder what 37 signals would do.

143 points by sant0sk1 15y ago

i say fuck the legal patenting system...if you really want to make something....just GO AHEAD AND MAKE IT!!..fuck em all!!

rbarooah 15y ago
Is that what you'd advise people to say to the judge?
- samyzee 15y ago
  What I am saying is that on that you dont want to think about what you will say to the judge even before building your product....if your product was really that successful tht you got patent trolled you will probably have the money to hire a lawyer to represent you.
  - rbarooah 15y ago
    I agree that we shouldn't stop building stuff because of this worry. Sadly we know by example that not everyone who gets hit by trolls has money for a defense.
geebee 15y ago
Here's the problem: how do you feel about essentially donating your time and creative energy to patent trolls and defense lawyers? If at least there were some kind of public good, I could almost stomach it, but to see these vultures take away the benefits of my hard work, it would be incredibly painful. What makes this worse is that it almost seems to be a kind of roulette... but then again, that is a design feature rather than a flaw from the pov of the trolls. After all, if patents were easy to understand and predictable, people could easily see what is patented legitimately and what isn't, and sidestep the minefield. The system needs to be essentially random, opaque, and unpredictable to keep the industry stocked with fresh meat.
- technomancy 15y ago
  Seems like incorporating your company outside the US sidesteps a good portion of this danger. The more articles I read, the more appealing this is to me, were I ever to go into business for myself.
  - bergie 15y ago
    Yep, life as a developer in Europe is a lot less problematic, even though pay can be lower. Of course the potential downside is that a patent troll can still block your sales to USA, or even get you into the situation where you can't travel to the country. Small risk to take in exchange for creative freedom, I think.
- samyzee 15y ago
  exactly....the current system was not built keeping software innovation in mind!!
  - rbarooah 15y ago
    Right, but is legal martyrdom going to change things?
maukdaddy 15y ago
Hopefully you are never involved in any legal dispute, because the discovery process is going to be hilarious when this comment turns up.
- samyzee 15y ago
  yeah the audience is going to burst in applause when the prosecution reads out this comment.
  - rbanffy 15y ago
    If you ever end up in court for patent litigation, drop me a message. I'll be there to applaud you when the plaintiff lawyer reads it.
handrake 15y ago
well the best way to do this would fix the current situation with patent reform...
samyzee 15y ago
a) whenever i comment on something on the internet I do not want to think about what legal implications it might have for a hypothetical legal dispute tht I might get involved in the future b) We are assuming that the prosecution will be smart enough to figure out that samyzee on hacker news is in fact me. c) To Hacker News: Please add a feature that lets me delete my comments!!

felipemnoa 15y ago

If it were easy, everybody would be doing it. It does suck that now independent developers have to also worry about patent litigation. However, it will not stop the most resolved developers from continuing forward. On the bright side, patent trolls are patenting the most obvious patents right now. In 20-30 years all of those patent will expire. I'll be amazed if 20 years from now we will still continue to patent obvious things like one click button transactions. If so, we all deserve to go down the ship of financial failure since it is us, society, that allows such things. Meanwhile, if we could only find the best ways to make patent trolls' lives more painful... At least it would dissuade the casual patent troll.

rbarooah 15y ago
The implication is that products for which there is a demand won't come to market. It might not be easy, but society is harmed if we make it artificially harder to respond to market demand.
- felipemnoa 15y ago
  I understand, but unfortunately short term (like next year) is hard to change that (or maybe we can we just haven't figured it out). It is still better to continue moving forward, we'll figure something out along the way.
  - rbarooah 15y ago
    What do you mean by 'moving forward', and what do you expect to happen that's going to change things in the longer term?
    - felipemnoa 15y ago
      I mean don't just give up. I don't know what will change, but things have a way to work themselves up if one continues to hammer at the problem. There will always be issues when trying to do something important. This is just another one. And as I write this I realize that I sound a bit corny. The shame... (no sarcasm intended)

programminggeek 15y ago

All businesses have risk. Even if you are an indie one man shop you are in fact a business and there are risks. Same thing goes for being a lawyer or accountant or contractor. If you screw up, it could cost you financially in a very big way, even if you didn't intend to do anything wrong. Even successful businesses can crumble, even billion dollar businesses can get beat up by litigation to the point it isn't even worth continuing. To say that the sky is falling for indie devs is a bit silly. There are plenty of places you can build, innovate, distribute, and succeed. Sure, the iTunes App Store thing is big today, or maybe Facebook, or maybe Steam, or maybe Wii's downloadable channel, it doesn't matter. Any one of those could be gone in a year or two. Here's an example, there are people out there who make millions of dollars selling e-books and mediocre/overpriced software on Clickbank right now. Some of those people get sued I'm sure for their products. More people show up. You could take the same ebook and sell it on Kindle or Nook if you got shut down or you could sell your software on the Mac App Store or Chrome Web Store if CB went under. There are so many platforms to distribute and build software and businesses on now, it really is hard to complain about the death of the indie developer because there are so many new companies getting started every day on all these different platforms that didn't exist even 5 years ago. As a business owner you can't control all risk, but you certainly can and should plan around them. If one channel gets shut down, move on to a different one or a different product. Great devs and great companies aren't built on one hit one time wonders.

rbarooah 15y ago
Nothing you say here seems to contradict the author's position that the patent situation is making things worse for indie devs.
- ignifero 15y ago
  But that situation is not anywhere near impossible. What's more, the patent system is there to serve a purpose, innovation, even (and especially) for the indie developers. Now, if that purpose is not served, which seems to be the case for software, it's time to lobby for governments to interfere, not to give up on independent entrepreneurship.

hxf148 15y ago

Our startup (http://infostripe.com http://infostripe.com) is built on independent spirit. So far we have been doing well. It's a struggle sometimes but always worth the effort.

bretthopper 15y ago
Every comment you've made has a link to your startup in it. There's a difference between self promotion and spam.
- hxf148 15y ago
  It's true, I do mention my startup a lot. It's just that we are a small (aka unfunded) startup with lots of dev and little marketing.. when I see an article that is relevant and I have a thought on it I link to try and reach out. I don't have much time to really get into comments as I'd like. I read a lot though. I will try and find other ways to contribute.

benihana 15y ago

It's really hard to want to continue reading when the third sentence says this: Little has changed with the process of software development since the 1980’s I understand the point: that things are the more the same than ever, that this guy is a salty old sonofabitch who's forgotten more than i've learned, but seriously. Little has changed with the process of software development since the 1980s other than the tools? The entire way we think about why we're building software and what we're trying to get out of has changed and is still changing.

mkn 15y ago

In the days where software was distributed on magnetic media, such as reels of tape, cassettes, or floppy disks, it cost a lot of money to get the product to a customer. One of us is misremembering. I seem to recall an interview with Gates and/or Ballmer where they talked about the realization that the cost of 5 or 6 floppies at wholesale was insignificant compared to the revenue from the software, that it was a no-brainer cost-wise. CDs were the first time when cost became an issue, iirc (again) because you had to pay for one or more masters to print the production copies. I'd feel better if his history was right. This time the retail channel itself is very cheap, but the ancillary costs, both financially and emotionally, are very high. And, of course, only large companies and publishers can bear these costs. My fear is that It’s only a matter of time before developers find the risks and expenses prohibitive and retreat to the safety of a larger organization. We’ll be going back to square one. I can't even address the "emotional costs" he talks about, but there is a precedent for dealing with risks of this kind. For consulting engineers, it's called "errors and omissions insurance." It strikes me that if there isn't something like that for developers, one plausible reason is that this kind of liability hasn't actually been a problem. Is there errors and omissions insurance for developers? From our experience, it’s entirely possible that all the revenue for a product can be eaten up by legal fees. The author uses the phrase "from our experience," but I wonder what that experience actually is. At this point, it's not even anecdotal, because he doesn't supply the anecdote! We can't even begin to ask if his experience generalizes. For example, did he get good counsel? Was he actually infringing? Should he have settled? Did he avail himself of the FSF or ESF if applicable? Should his product have been more profitable? I think I'm either blessed or cursed with too much curiosity to take this guy at his word.

allwein 15y ago
>One of us is misremembering. I seem to recall an interview with Gates and/or Ballmer where they talked about the realization that the cost of 5 or 6 floppies at wholesale was insignificant ... I'd feel better if his history was right. Sure, the cost of delivering a single copy of software to a given customer was relatively inexpensive. But Craig is talking about how, in the absence of the internet or other easy customer acquisition and distribution methods, the way you used to get your software to customers was by making thousands of physical copies, boxing them up in a nice shiny box with manuals, and have computer software and electronics stores display your software on their physical store shelves. And that's quite a bite of money to have tied up in inventory even though a single piece of media itself was relatively inexpensive.

bugsy 15y ago

He's got his history completely wrong. From the first days that home computers were affordable at all, there were tons of very small software shops. I recall purchasing programs from computer stores that came in poly bags containing a photocopied manual on card stock and a cassette tape with a photocopied label that had been glued on by hand. If you called the company for support, sometimes you woke the guy up.

endlessvoid94 15y ago

Unrelated, but interesting nonetheless: the current software industry has a strikingly similar feel to the early texas oil prospecting days. Independents are suddenly able to take a little bit of risk, take on some money (then: banks, now: angels and VCs), and work by themselves or in small teams to produce something that lots of people need (then: oil, now: good software). Some of the biggest fortunes in history were made back then (1900 - 1930s), just as some of the biggest fortunes are now being made in this industry. The digger I deep (no pun intended), the more similar these two stages of history look alike. I'm sure there are other eras that also share these common threads.

noonespecial 15y ago

The sad reality is that if you make something of value, there are rotten people who will come and try to steal from you. The author thinks he's discovered something new. I don't think he has. "Patent trolling" might be a bit of a new angle but business has always been risky. In some parts of the world, if you farm a little too much, gangs come by in rusty toyotas with AK47's and help themselves (and might kidnap your children for good measure). In our society, we've allowed these men to wear suits and pretend they are contributing members and in exchange, they no longer use guns. This seems like a valid compromise until we as a society outgrow this sort of behavior. (Here's hoping) There are tools for managing risk. Create an LLC and have professional liability insurance. Sure bad stuff can happen. I had an over-zealous zoning official try to revoke the business license for my house because I was "manufacturing" software (and manufacturing is zoned industrial, donchaknow). I wish there weren't patent trolls, but at some point you have to admit that you can't spend your life worrying about all of the bad stuff that could happen. Take a few reasonable precautions and then do your thing.

rbarooah 15y ago
Neither an LLC nor liability insurance will stop your business being destroyed and years of your life being wasted if a troll decides to target you. Would you suggest an LLC for each product so that they can only be attacked individually?
- noonespecial 15y ago
  Actually, if they are suitably different, yes. It has the added benefit of making it easy to sell the product/business down the road or convert to a different kind of Corp to get investors. If a product is good enough to make money on it's own, it's good enough for its own LLC.
ww520 15y ago
OT: Is LLC better than C-Corp or S-Corp in CA? Isn't LLC mostly for real estate holding? What I have been doing is having a parent C-Corp and using DBA for individual product/company under it. I wonder whether I should switch to LLC.

onan_barbarian 15y ago

One of the issues here that wasn't mentioned, facing independent developers, is the almost pathological tendency of some people/groups in the F/OSS community to clone any even mildly successful product for no particular reason. I'm a big fan of free and open source software (especially when it's genuinely new or fills an actual gap, like the GNU tools and Linux), but there are times I wonder whether there are a lot of vested interests out there who would like to drive the cost of software to zero and make us all work for a wage providing 'services'. There are entire categories of software now where people are now conditioned only to accept an open source product. Can you imagine anyone building a new computer language now, commercially? If it was even vaguely successful it would be cloned and forked so quickly it'd make your head spin. Between the ideologues like Stallman, who effectively think it's immoral to make money off selling the software itself (I know his position is supposedly more nuanced than that, but free software effectively amounts to this if you have to hand out source to all and sundry) and the open-source-friendly companies like IBM and Google - who have every reason to drive the $$$ available off software to zero, it's easy to feel a bit beleaguered.

rbarooah 15y ago
I couldn't agree more. People sometimes seem to clone stuff because they think they're 'sticking it to the man', when in fact they can only do this because they work for a corporation during the day. And the 'man' they are sticking it to is actually an indie dev trying to get out of wage slavery. I think open source is clearly critical to the modern software ecology, but I wish people would think carefully about why they are doing it in each case, rather than assuming their actions are automatically benign because of a sprinkling of 'open' dust.
mellis 15y ago
But there is a reason: to provide a free / open-source version of a useful and successful product. This software commons may lower the value of competing commercial products but it provides value to everyone else (who can use and build on it without cost or permission).
- rbarooah 15y ago

daimyoyo 15y ago

What I'd like to see is a collective legal fund to protect devs from patent trolls. Like insurance, everyone pays into the system and if you need representation, high quality lawyers would be there for you. That seems to me to be the best solution to this problem short of abolishing software patents altogether.

rbarooah 15y ago
I like they idea, but I don't see how it reduces the risk. If someone has a valid patent, you're still in trouble.
- dhess 15y ago
  An independent developers' patent pool, then.
  - rbarooah 15y ago
    Patent pools are no defense against trolls.
    - dhess 15y ago
      Fair point.
- tomjen3 15y ago
  No, you just have to make sure they understand that a lawsuit against you ends with a verdict from the supreme court after a long and costly legal battle.

zentechen 15y ago

Should move the corporate to China and clone the heck out of everything. Facebook -> RenRen Twitter -> Weibo YouTube -> Tudou Google -> Baidu Flickr -> YuPoo See http://www.randomwire.com/chinese-web-20-clones http://www.randomwire.com/chinese-web-20-clones Yeah, Trolls, go ahead and sue them.

rbarooah 15y ago

Does anyone think that a legislation preventing NPE's from suing for patent infringement would be practical? They'd still be able to hold them - just not sue. It seems like something that large corporations as well as independents could get behind.

wtracy 15y ago
How do you prove that an organization is an NPE? All they have to do is hire a couple of college kids dirt cheap and they can show that they are "developing" a product. Denying patent protection to anyone who doesn't already have a finished product out on the market opens a whole new can of worms.
- rbarooah 15y ago
  The law already deals with vague definitions. It really wouldn't be too hard to write something that erred on the side of making it somewhat hard to prove that you were practicing.

soitgoes 15y ago

Does anyone have any statistics about the number of independent developers / startups that suffer a significant negative financial impact because of a patent infringement lawsuit? My gut feeling is that it's a very small percentage. A few years ago, I think Paul Graham wrote an article suggesting startups shouldn't worry about being sued because in practice it rarely happens to them.

danssig 15y ago

Well, the good thing about it is maybe this will force a "Silicon Valley" to finally appear in Europe where the odds aren't stacked so badly against the little guy.

sreitshamer 15y ago

I wonder what 37 signals would do.