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I suggest that it's because of patent law. Martin Fowler wrote about it in his blog recently, and I certainly couldn't put it better myself. Although he is di
by johnpapps 15y ago
I suggest that it's because of patent law. Martin Fowler wrote about it in his blog recently, and I certainly couldn't put it better myself. Although he is discussing software patents, I believe the same arguments apply across technology these days. http://martinfowler.com/bliki/SoftwarePatent.html http://martinfowler.com/bliki/SoftwarePatent.html
- gwern 15y agoI don't really buy the patent argument. A 30 or 40 year old trend over the entire economy is supposed to be explained by patents? There's a seriously strong argument which requires equally strong supporting evidence. Patents don't even apply to much of the economy like education, and even within particular sectors like health care/medicine, the patents tend to be heavily concentrated in things like pharmaceuticals. So shouldn't we be seeing outsized differences between sectors and sub-sectors, where the patent-free area is growing like gangbusters and the patent-encumbered one is static or negative? As far as I know, this has not been shown, and sectors which ought to be suffering the most (like software) are still doing pretty well...