Paul Graham on Software Patents
I had Paul Graham’s essays bookmarked for quite a while. I read Paul’s book, Hackers and Painters and have been following his work ever since (well, it’s only been a few weeks). Anyway, I thought this passage from his Are Software Patents Evil? essay was insightful and a bit humorous:
Why do patents play so small a role in software? I can think of three possible reasons.
One is that software is so complicated that patents by themselves are not worth very much. I may be maligning other fields here, but it seems that in most types of engineering you can hand the details of some new technique to a group of medium-high quality people and get the desired result. For example, if someone develops a new process for smelting ore that gets a better yield, and you assemble a team of qualified experts and tell them about it, they'll be able to get the same yield. This doesn't seem to work in software. Software is so subtle and unpredictable that "qualified experts" don't get you very far.
That's why we rarely hear phrases like "qualified expert" in the software business. What that level of ability can get you is, say, to make your software compatible with some other piece of software-- in eight months, at enormous cost. To do anything harder you need individual brilliance. If you assemble a team of qualified experts and tell them to make a new web-based email program, they'll get their asses kicked by a team of inspired nineteen year olds.
And:
One thing I can say is that 99.9% of the people who express opinions on the subject do it not based on such research, but out of a kind of religious conviction.
The whole essay is well worth the read. From now on, though, I hope to start at the beginning of his list.