It’s been a rather software patent related day.

I spent a few hours reworking some code to avoid infringing some patents we recently discovered, and also found myself reading a post entitled ‘Are Software Patents Evil?‘ by Paul Graham (via stillhq).

Paul makes some very interesting points. I’ve always believed the the patents vs secrecy argument, but his argument that software patents should not be considered any different to other patents is interesting and quite persuasive. The problem of ‘patent trolls’ will certainly be something which will have to be resolved as he suggests, but I suspect it will prove much more difficult than we can imagine. The most interesting point, however, is that the only group actually trying to enforce software patents are the trolls. This would argue for abolishing them abolishing them altogether, except that Paul illustrates a number of favourable side effects - which brings us back to the patents vs secrecy argument.

My own experience for the day was less enlightening. Take a piece of code which does something in one order, and rearrange it slightly so the implementation no longer exactly matches the patent’s description. The whole thing feels a little like refactoring without the whole ’simplify the code’ goal. Anyway, it was a decent excuse for me to play with a bit of code I hadn’t touched before, but the whole thing doesn’t really feel like useful work.

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