4 ms·

Such is the world without patent protection. Once they grew large, these behemoths sent their lobbyists to Washington and quashed the patent system. They cried

• fouric 5y ago
  I anticipate this being downvoted by people who aren't aware of the nuance of the idea here (although, to be fair, that's because the nuance wasn't properly explained), so I'm going to explain it: Patents allow smaller inventors a monopoly on their inventions. Without this monopoly, then because of their massive amounts of capital and engineering talent, massive megacorps/conglomerates are able to easily copy (even if imperfectly) most things that you might want to invent, with little recourse from the inventors. (yes, behemoth organizations can still get patents - that's often still a better trade for a smaller inventor) ...that said, I'm still not convinced that software patents are a good idea.
• z3t4 5y ago
  In theory patterns would protect the small innovative inventors - but in reality software patterns are used like nuclear weapons - to frighten anyone to not sue - or you would be sued back with a bunch of pattern like round corners, comments in source code, a program that can accept connections, etc... We however have copyright. So the big companies can't just copy your software and sell it as is... unless you open source it using a MIT licence, then they will copy it, make some closed source changes and compete with you.