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Some companies have a culture of patenting. You want to stay hired - you patent everything you can, to reach the targets. A friend worked for a company that di

by miahi 14y ago

Some companies have a culture of patenting. You want to stay hired - you patent everything you can, to reach the targets. A friend worked for a company that did code maintenance (support/bug fixing) for some embedded IBM systems. They were bought by IBM, and in the first meeting their new IBM boss said to them "I checked the company records and I see no patents. This needs to be changed." What kind of patents can you get while fixing bugs in some C code written by somebody else?

notatoad 14y ago
And if you choose to work for one of those companies with a culture of patenting, you deserve the shame. If you run a company and you want to go patent crazy, you should be starved of engineering talent. You do have a choice of where you work. "i just want to keep my job" is not a valid excuse for anything.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- davorak 14y ago
  I think this is hard strategy to convince the world to follow. It involves causing culture shift in existing business and the culture momentum in this case is not insignificant. The next problem is that the business exist in a legal system that rewards patenting profusely and broadly. A company that refuses to do this is at a disadvantage. In addition to avoiding companies that participate in such behavior what other strategies to you think are worth while? Google is the biggest advocate for change in the direction of devaluing software patents or at least they are easy to observe doing such.
- hkmurakami 14y ago
  >You do have a choice of where you work. "i just want to keep my job" is not a valid excuse for anything. I'm not sure how valid this is. It might be true in most of the United States, but if you work for $GIANT_JAPANESE_AUTO_COMPANY which produces the second largest number of patents/year in the world after IBM (iirc), you have very few employment options other than said company geographically, and the corporate culture there makes it extremely difficult to change jobs at all.
- rollo_tommasi 14y ago
  How old are you? Your attitude of absolute, rigid moral certainty suggests you don't have much experience with the real world.
- dagw 14y ago
  You do have a choice of where you work Only if you don't care too much about where you work or what your work on. If you're happy to work on any old Rails app anywhere in the US, sure you have plenty of choice. If you want to work on cutting edge quantum computing close to New York, not so much.
pbhjpbhj 14y ago
>What kind of patents can you get while fixing bugs in some C code written by somebody else? // Ones related to bug fixing? Ones concerning optimisation of code to enable lower memory use or lower power consumption or more compressed data formats or ...? Some companies, the big players in electronics and computing for example, use patents not only to enforce the limited monopolies but also as bargaining chips enabling them to buy in to patent pools and such - like you can use these 500 patents if we can use your 500. I'm sure with some such deals some "packing" is needed to bolster the numbers and let you play above your station.

by miahi 14y ago

notatoad 14y ago

And if you choose to work for one of those companies with a culture of patenting, you deserve the shame. If you run a company and you want to go patent crazy, you should be starved of engineering talent. You do have a choice of where you work. "i just want to keep my job" is not a valid excuse for anything.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
davorak 14y ago
I think this is hard strategy to convince the world to follow. It involves causing culture shift in existing business and the culture momentum in this case is not insignificant. The next problem is that the business exist in a legal system that rewards patenting profusely and broadly. A company that refuses to do this is at a disadvantage. In addition to avoiding companies that participate in such behavior what other strategies to you think are worth while? Google is the biggest advocate for change in the direction of devaluing software patents or at least they are easy to observe doing such.
hkmurakami 14y ago
>You do have a choice of where you work. "i just want to keep my job" is not a valid excuse for anything. I'm not sure how valid this is. It might be true in most of the United States, but if you work for $GIANT_JAPANESE_AUTO_COMPANY which produces the second largest number of patents/year in the world after IBM (iirc), you have very few employment options other than said company geographically, and the corporate culture there makes it extremely difficult to change jobs at all.
rollo_tommasi 14y ago
How old are you? Your attitude of absolute, rigid moral certainty suggests you don't have much experience with the real world.
dagw 14y ago
You do have a choice of where you work Only if you don't care too much about where you work or what your work on. If you're happy to work on any old Rails app anywhere in the US, sure you have plenty of choice. If you want to work on cutting edge quantum computing close to New York, not so much.

pbhjpbhj 14y ago

>What kind of patents can you get while fixing bugs in some C code written by somebody else? // Ones related to bug fixing? Ones concerning optimisation of code to enable lower memory use or lower power consumption or more compressed data formats or ...? Some companies, the big players in electronics and computing for example, use patents not only to enforce the limited monopolies but also as bargaining chips enabling them to buy in to patent pools and such - like you can use these 500 patents if we can use your 500. I'm sure with some such deals some "packing" is needed to bolster the numbers and let you play above your station.