Decent article here explaining the problems with patents in the tech world – Article. Now we all know patents are a problem and hindering innovation in technology, even if people find out the benefits of the online format vs traditional patent style. Maybe there are some solutions that would work for everyone? Just think about this problem when you read the following quote from the article:
“Patents threaten every software developer, and the patent wars we have long feared have broken out. Software developers and software users – which in our society, is most people – need software to be free of patents.
When Dan Ravicher of the Public Patent Foundation studied one large program (Linux, which is the kernel of the GNU/Linux operating system) in 2004, he found 283 U.S. patents that appeared to cover computing ideas implemented in the source code of that program. That same year, it was estimated that Linux was .25 percent of the whole GNU/Linux system. Multiplying 300 by 400 we get the order-of-magnitude estimate that the system as a whole was threatened by around 100,000 patents.”