GPLv3 is a key event in Microsoft's war to divide and conquer the Free Software / Open Source community. Most of the Linux industry seems to be betting on GPLv3 to put an end to Microsoft's patent claims. My question is simply: is Microsoft sitting around scratching its head, or has it already started on the next level of play...? Are we going to see those 235 patents handed over to the community, or are we instead going to see "IP Bridges" as the next great Product to come out of Redmond?
Altruism is also observed in vampire bats, curiously, who remember who shared blood with them previously, and who did not. Altruism is a simple kind of savings scheme. When you are lucky, you share. When you are unlucky, you borrow. It depends on a good memory and a set of rules that have to be instinctive, so everyone agrees with them. (No point if everyone randomly invents "good" and "bad" behaviour.)
Guilt, on the other hand, is waiting for the blow to fall. We don't feel guilty when there's no risk of being punished, and we don't act altruistic when there's no-one watching.
So even if the moral compass is in-built, it only activates in the presence of others.
I am still using a Sony X505 which is 0.38" to.8" thick (it tapers). It cost me $4000 and suffers from a short battery life but is absolutely lovely to carry around and use. A kind of supermodel notebook - beautiful enough to make the uselessness not matter at all.
If Intel can make something similarly slim, with a long battery life, I'm a client.
Strange. So how did society invent and produce before there were patents? What about the internet, produced when software was not patentable...?
Your argument that people invent to secure patents is completely bogus. People invent because it's the only way to create market advantage, and that's the only way to make money. There are a few exceptions, cases where patents have stopped the small inventor from being crushed by big competitors. These exceptions are so rare, and so proportionally unimportant that they are really insufficient to justify the whole patent system.
Promoting disclosure, yes the patent system should in theory do this. Promoting invention, that's complete and utter bollocks.
Agriculture, where no patents have applied, has managed to eliminate famine since the 1950's. Not one single famine due to failure of the agricultural system. (Only due to war, natural disaster, politics.)
Pharmaceutics, heavily protected by patents, has failed to stop mass death and sickness from preventable diseases, has failed to promote invention in the areas where it's most needed - malaria, dengue fever, etc. etc. - and has failed to create a competitive market. It's succeeded in creating cartels and monopolies of the worst kind.
We (the FFII) are organising a series of conferences to discuss the European patent system, and Mark Shuttleworth was our keynote speaker last week. (The conference had over thirty speakers and panelists, including Bill Kovacic, the US Federal Trade Commissioner...)
Mark spoke for 30 minutes, and his keynote is available here. He provided this very elegant argument against patents on business methods and most software: patents are society's gift to inventors in exchange for disclosure. When an invention is self-disclosing, i.e. you understand it when you use it, society has no interest in granting a patent for it, indeed is penalised by doing so, and therefore should not grant it.
On Digital Majority:...If Dell announce that they will support Novell/SuSE, rather than the obviously more popular choice of Ubuntu, they will be expressing Redmond's preference, not that of their surveyed public. If Dell support Novell/SuSE, they do it with Microsoft's blessing, and this will be a second step towards a MS-Linux. The first step was, of course, Microsoft's deal with Novell.
OK, so presumably a large chunk of the $50bn will be in paper, not cash, but this is a good answer to those who say that Microsoft's $50bn in cash guarantees that they will be around for a long time.
A handful of deals like this, and the money will be gone. Then it's back to actually doing good business, something Microsoft seems awfully bad at these last years.
If Microsoft do buy Yahoo, it screams "duopoly", but in the long term they will ruin Yahoo's business, and leave the market entirely to Google.
If you are an individual or small team, the most important thing is to keep control over your copyright so you can make money from those people willing to pay for your work.
If you want to open source it, use the GPL and offer a commercial license opt-out. If you use the BSD, no-one will pay.
Do not accept any contributions unless people are willing to transfer (c) to you, or you cannot relicense your work.
Do not use GPL libraries, only BSD-licensed ones, or you cannot relicense your work.
If you are a team or company that does not want to make money from the software, license it under the BSD or Apache license.
Patents do, actually, serve some purpose: they help people publish their work and still retain some space in which to develop products. There are just so many problems when we apply heavy, slow, industrial patents to something as light and diverse as software. And there are big problems with patents in pharmaceuticals as well... focussing on private profits at all costs simply does not work well for society.
We have three main alternatives:
1. Throw out the entire patent system - this has happened in the past in different countries. 2. Throw out software patents - this is a simple and effective cure for the problems that patents cause in the software industry. 3. Fix the patent system.
The last option is the most difficult but potentially it could create a patent system that actually works in all sectors and really does help society, not just the rich and the lucky.
The EthiPat campaign has tried to describe what is really wrong with the patent system as a whole, in terms of discrimination, and use this as a measure of what a 'good' patent system would look like.
Note that an 'ethical patent' would be very different from the things we call patents today. Basically it would be a lot more like copyright, and provide limited protection for very specific descriptions of ideas.
And if such an idea worked, we'd be able to go and look up all documented "mobile email solutions" because it'd be so easy, harmless, and cheap to register an "ethical patent" that everyone would do it... much like buying domain names.
The FFII (who also fight against software patents, and for open standards) has been working to modify IPRED2 and/or get it rejected, for many months.
The FFII's IPRED2 project needs your help. Defeating this directive requires a lot of analysis and writing of amendments, which is done by volunteers, but we also have to bring lobbyists to Brussels to do the groundwork with MEPs. That costs money - for travel, hotel, food, and in some cases, to pay people's time, because it's hard to spend months in Brussels without any income.
I know all this because I'm the FFII's president, and the only reason I accepted to take that (unpaid) job, a year and a half ago, was because this is the only pan-European organisation capable of fighting against software patents, and other bogus laws like IPRED2, effectively.
The new EFF team in Brussels actually consists of an ex-FFII activist, who is still on the IPRED2 workgroup, along with a dozen or more others. So if you want to help, give the FFII your support. See the FFII's donations page for how to make a donation.
Apple tend to launch a product and then fork it into a product family that covers a nice price range. This format could expand to include a hard drive and become a real portable hand-held, the new Newton. It could also shrink to become a simpler phone. Expect the actual release model in June to have much more memory, and better battery life.
The biggest problem with all smartphones today is that UI design is generally terrible. If Apple can get this right, and make a family of phones that react quickly and are fun to use, they will sell a lot of them.
Further, it seems to me, phone or not, that this is what the iPod will look like in 2 years time. The wheel is no longer needed, and this format makes video a pleasant reality.
So it's quite possible that the "phone" part of this product is less significant than the large-screen, no-button, Apple-inside format.
Has anyone bothered to study whether children affected by digestive system disorders like Coeliac disease and Chrohn's disease were exposed to antibiotics at a vulnerable young age?
Seems quite evident to me that there is a series of factors: working mothers who have less time to breast-feed; babies put into daycare where they can get more bugs; wider use of antibiotics to cure these bugs; lower immunity and weaker intestinal fauna & flora due to less breast milk...
Probably no cure for someone who's digestive system got so messed by by antibiotics when they were 4-12 months old that they react to gluten, nuts, whatever, as a foreign substance.
But for today's babies, more time with the mother, more breast milk, and no antibiotics unless it's a matter of life and death... that might cure it.
The key point from the article is that Novell accuses Microsoft of spreading patent FUD to kill Linux deals.
Software patents are such a fantastic weapon for monopolists who have lots of lawyers. No surprise Microsoft is pushing so hard to get them legalised in Europe.
To a large extent, human society is a distributed problem-solving machine. Only a part of this is actual physical work - agriculture, mining, etc, A large - very large - part is pure information processing.
Writing emails, discussing on Slashdot, it's actually part of the human machine. This is how we refine solutions to complex problems that we may not even be aware of. This is how we prevent conflicts, create societies, and basically manage to be a species on holiday. (Oh, and cheap energy also helps a lot).
Large static structures (companies) are less and less significant. People join many more networks, when it's simple & cheap to do so.
This affects the way we work. Traditional desktop software becomes less and less important. For example the bulk of work I used to do using a word processor now gets hammered out in wikis. An incredible, and increasing, amount of work happens just by email.
The future of online collaboration and work probably lies in today's games, anyhow.
Would Seagate really attempt to market a drive that was going to protect pedophiles and terrorists? (Not to mention us ordinary citizens who don't wholly and utterly trust the organs of the state to act systematically in our best interests.)
If so, it's a brave move. But somehow it just seems so unlikely...
Here's the trick. Don't scare your population with too many moves at once. Take away their freedoms one by one, starting with the ones no-one really cares about. Let other countries take one step too far, and if their populations don't squeal, make a further step yourself.
So the EU enacted its spy state law last year, while people said, "even the states does not go that far". The EU Data Retention Directive wants (it needs to be ratified by individual countries) to track every phone call made, every email sent, every web site visited, every cell phone location, and hold this data for over a decade. The data would be available to non-governmental organisations (private firms). Anonymous internet usage would be banned. Anonymous prepaid mobile phone cards would be banned. All this, of course, to save us from terrorism and organised crime.
And the UK has constructed a surveillance system that beats anything ever built by the soviet spy states. Every public urban space is monitored, recorded, tracked. The only privacy you have is in your home, where you are safely under house arrest, unable to do anything to damage the interests of the state.
It was just a matter of time before the FBI asked for the same powers. What police force would not? It's a copper's wet dream. Every one of us stinking criminals-in-waiting tracked like cockroaches in a pen. No more crime. No more disorder. No more rebellion.
AMD has, pretty much, wrapped up the high-end market with its Opterons. All the noise about Itanium - it's turned into Opteron sales.
So now Intel has made a strong come-back on the desktop... and AMD calculates, do we make slices of silicon that sell for $100, or that sell for $1,000 and the answer is pretty clear. AMD does not have the capacity that Intel has, so it's making the most out its fabs by aiming at the server market.
A license can crumble, metaphorically, when the problem it solves becomes irrelevant.
The GPLv2, for example, is focussed on the distribution of software. It dates from an era where distribution meant floppy disks, tapes, and perhaps for the very luck, FTP.
But today a lot (most?) software is never actually distributed to users - it is accessed via web services - and the GPL is powerless to force vendors who take GPL'd software and improve it, and embed those improvements into web applications, to release those improvements.
You cannot ask for the source code for a web application that is built on GPL'd software.
If you want to contribute to the GPLv3, you can. The FFII, for example, proposed some changes that would clarify the GPLv3 with respect to patent law in Europe (the current draft is too US-biased).
Torvalds doesn't need to contribute, but I'm glad he's moved to a more neutral stance. The GPLv2 is old and out of date and though it still works today, will start to crumble in a few years.
In every new project my firm does, we end up adding our own conditions onto the GPL3 (for instance for patents) and it'd be far better to have these defined as standard.
It's good to be critical of processes that aren't clear, and it's entirely possible that the FSF won't be able to produce a worthy successor to GPLv2, which is an incredibly important document in the history of software, but we should give them the benefit of the doubt.
IBM's patent lawyers invented software patents in the first place. You can see what they were thinking... "we patent all our hardware, now more and more of those designs are implemented in software, so we should patent software too".
The trouble is, there is no dividing line between a patent for microcode, and a patent for swinging a pizza. The moment you allow the definition of a software model to be patented, you open the gates to patents on every idea. It just takes time - 10 years - before the patent industry assiduously hacks every single definition, but it happens.
IBM is now very unhappy with the patent situation. They have invested hundreds of millions (billions, probably) in their patent portfolio but it mostly covers older technology where there is less and less licensing opportunity. Meanwhile the patent business is creating record turnover, which deflates their patent portfolio.
Yes, IBM is against business process patents. Big deal. Any business process can be reworked as a software patent. Any border that tries to separate the 'good' software patents from the 'bad' ones can be hacked until it's gone.
The only reason large firms like IBM, SAP, and Microsoft still support the software patent model is because their patent policy is dictated by patent attornies. If the CFO or CTO was in charge, it'd be different.
As for the suggestion that patents were "closed" before... bizarre. The whole justification for granting a patent monopoly is to reward the inventor for publishing his work.
Patents don't drive innovation, they are what happens when lawyers discover lucrative deposits of innovation sheltering in nice little shaded valleys, and decide to burn down the trees, strip mine the valleys, and extract the last drop of value from the accumulated innovation, creating havoc and destruction in the process.
The sad thing is that governments are convinced that patents are equal to innovation, making the stupid mistake of confusing correlation with causation.
Software patents are not what drives programmers to invent. Software patents are a tool by which lawyers rip-off the IT industry.
Every single time patent law is relaxed (in the US as in Europe) to include more software, you will find IP lawyers steering the process.
It's not just in security but in every domain. Small firms are the ones that innovate best. Big firms are best at exploiting a market.
This is one of the reasons that software patents - which hit small firms disproportionately - are so bad for innovation. Anything that makes life harder for small firms - red tape, software patents, litigation, etc. - is bad for the economy because small-to-medium firms are what keep our economies healthy.
Slashdot Mirror
GPLv3 is a key event in Microsoft's war to divide and conquer the Free Software / Open Source community. Most of the Linux industry seems to be betting on GPLv3 to put an end to Microsoft's patent claims. My question is simply: is Microsoft sitting around scratching its head, or has it already started on the next level of play...? Are we going to see those 235 patents handed over to the community, or are we instead going to see "IP Bridges" as the next great Product to come out of Redmond?
Altruism is also observed in vampire bats, curiously, who remember who shared blood with them previously, and who did not. Altruism is a simple kind of savings scheme. When you are lucky, you share. When you are unlucky, you borrow. It depends on a good memory and a set of rules that have to be instinctive, so everyone agrees with them. (No point if everyone randomly invents "good" and "bad" behaviour.)
Guilt, on the other hand, is waiting for the blow to fall. We don't feel guilty when there's no risk of being punished, and we don't act altruistic when there's no-one watching.
So even if the moral compass is in-built, it only activates in the presence of others.
I am still using a Sony X505 which is 0.38" to .8" thick (it tapers). It cost me $4000 and suffers from a short battery life but is absolutely lovely to carry around and use. A kind of supermodel notebook - beautiful enough to make the uselessness not matter at all.
If Intel can make something similarly slim, with a long battery life, I'm a client.
Strange. So how did society invent and produce before there were patents? What about the internet, produced when software was not patentable...?
Your argument that people invent to secure patents is completely bogus. People invent because it's the only way to create market advantage, and that's the only way to make money. There are a few exceptions, cases where patents have stopped the small inventor from being crushed by big competitors. These exceptions are so rare, and so proportionally unimportant that they are really insufficient to justify the whole patent system.
Promoting disclosure, yes the patent system should in theory do this. Promoting invention, that's complete and utter bollocks.
Agriculture, where no patents have applied, has managed to eliminate famine since the 1950's. Not one single famine due to failure of the agricultural system. (Only due to war, natural disaster, politics.)
Pharmaceutics, heavily protected by patents, has failed to stop mass death and sickness from preventable diseases, has failed to promote invention in the areas where it's most needed - malaria, dengue fever, etc. etc. - and has failed to create a competitive market. It's succeeded in creating cartels and monopolies of the worst kind.
We (the FFII) are organising a series of conferences to discuss the European patent system, and Mark Shuttleworth was our keynote speaker last week. (The conference had over thirty speakers and panelists, including Bill Kovacic, the US Federal Trade Commissioner...)
Mark spoke for 30 minutes, and his keynote is available here. He provided this very elegant argument against patents on business methods and most software: patents are society's gift to inventors in exchange for disclosure. When an invention is self-disclosing, i.e. you understand it when you use it, society has no interest in granting a patent for it, indeed is penalised by doing so, and therefore should not grant it.
More on the conference here.
On Digital Majority: ...If Dell announce that they will support Novell/SuSE, rather than the obviously more popular choice of Ubuntu, they will be expressing Redmond's preference, not that of their surveyed public. If Dell support Novell/SuSE, they do it with Microsoft's blessing, and this will be a second step towards a MS-Linux. The first step was, of course, Microsoft's deal with Novell.
Thatcher.
OK, so presumably a large chunk of the $50bn will be in paper, not cash, but this is a good answer to those who say that Microsoft's $50bn in cash guarantees that they will be around for a long time.
A handful of deals like this, and the money will be gone. Then it's back to actually doing good business, something Microsoft seems awfully bad at these last years.
If Microsoft do buy Yahoo, it screams "duopoly", but in the long term they will ruin Yahoo's business, and leave the market entirely to Google.
If you are an individual or small team, the most important thing is to keep control over your copyright so you can make money from those people willing to pay for your work.
If you want to open source it, use the GPL and offer a commercial license opt-out. If you use the BSD, no-one will pay.
Do not accept any contributions unless people are willing to transfer (c) to you, or you cannot relicense your work.
Do not use GPL libraries, only BSD-licensed ones, or you cannot relicense your work.
If you are a team or company that does not want to make money from the software, license it under the BSD or Apache license.
Patents do, actually, serve some purpose: they help people publish their work and still retain some space in which to develop products. There are just so many problems when we apply heavy, slow, industrial patents to something as light and diverse as software. And there are big problems with patents in pharmaceuticals as well... focussing on private profits at all costs simply does not work well for society.
We have three main alternatives:
1. Throw out the entire patent system - this has happened in the past in different countries.
2. Throw out software patents - this is a simple and effective cure for the problems that patents cause in the software industry.
3. Fix the patent system.
The last option is the most difficult but potentially it could create a patent system that actually works in all sectors and really does help society, not just the rich and the lucky.
The EthiPat campaign has tried to describe what is really wrong with the patent system as a whole, in terms of discrimination, and use this as a measure of what a 'good' patent system would look like.
Note that an 'ethical patent' would be very different from the things we call patents today. Basically it would be a lot more like copyright, and provide limited protection for very specific descriptions of ideas.
And if such an idea worked, we'd be able to go and look up all documented "mobile email solutions" because it'd be so easy, harmless, and cheap to register an "ethical patent" that everyone would do it... much like buying domain names.
The FFII (who also fight against software patents, and for open standards) has been working to modify IPRED2 and/or get it rejected, for many months.
The FFII's IPRED2 project needs your help. Defeating this directive requires a lot of analysis and writing of amendments, which is done by volunteers, but we also have to bring lobbyists to Brussels to do the groundwork with MEPs. That costs money - for travel, hotel, food, and in some cases, to pay people's time, because it's hard to spend months in Brussels without any income.
I know all this because I'm the FFII's president, and the only reason I accepted to take that (unpaid) job, a year and a half ago, was because this is the only pan-European organisation capable of fighting against software patents, and other bogus laws like IPRED2, effectively.
The new EFF team in Brussels actually consists of an ex-FFII activist, who is still on the IPRED2 workgroup, along with a dozen or more others. So if you want to help, give the FFII your support. See the FFII's donations page for how to make a donation.
Apple tend to launch a product and then fork it into a product family that covers a nice price range. This format could expand to include a hard drive and become a real portable hand-held, the new Newton. It could also shrink to become a simpler phone. Expect the actual release model in June to have much more memory, and better battery life.
The biggest problem with all smartphones today is that UI design is generally terrible. If Apple can get this right, and make a family of phones that react quickly and are fun to use, they will sell a lot of them.
Further, it seems to me, phone or not, that this is what the iPod will look like in 2 years time. The wheel is no longer needed, and this format makes video a pleasant reality.
So it's quite possible that the "phone" part of this product is less significant than the large-screen, no-button, Apple-inside format.
Has anyone bothered to study whether children affected by digestive system disorders like Coeliac disease and Chrohn's disease were exposed to antibiotics at a vulnerable young age?
Seems quite evident to me that there is a series of factors: working mothers who have less time to breast-feed; babies put into daycare where they can get more bugs; wider use of antibiotics to cure these bugs; lower immunity and weaker intestinal fauna & flora due to less breast milk...
Probably no cure for someone who's digestive system got so messed by by antibiotics when they were 4-12 months old that they react to gluten, nuts, whatever, as a foreign substance.
But for today's babies, more time with the mother, more breast milk, and no antibiotics unless it's a matter of life and death... that might cure it.
The key point from the article is that Novell accuses Microsoft of spreading patent FUD to kill Linux deals.
Software patents are such a fantastic weapon for monopolists who have lots of lawyers. No surprise Microsoft is pushing so hard to get them legalised in Europe.
To a large extent, human society is a distributed problem-solving machine. Only a part of this is actual physical work - agriculture, mining, etc, A large - very large - part is pure information processing.
Writing emails, discussing on Slashdot, it's actually part of the human machine. This is how we refine solutions to complex problems that we may not even be aware of. This is how we prevent conflicts, create societies, and basically manage to be a species on holiday. (Oh, and cheap energy also helps a lot).
Large static structures (companies) are less and less significant. People join many more networks, when it's simple & cheap to do so.
This affects the way we work. Traditional desktop software becomes less and less important. For example the bulk of work I used to do using a word processor now gets hammered out in wikis. An incredible, and increasing, amount of work happens just by email.
The future of online collaboration and work probably lies in today's games, anyhow.
Seems unlikely.
Would Seagate really attempt to market a drive that was going to protect pedophiles and terrorists? (Not to mention us ordinary citizens who don't wholly and utterly trust the organs of the state to act systematically in our best interests.)
If so, it's a brave move. But somehow it just seems so unlikely...
Here's the trick. Don't scare your population with too many moves at once. Take away their freedoms one by one, starting with the ones no-one really cares about. Let other countries take one step too far, and if their populations don't squeal, make a further step yourself.
So the EU enacted its spy state law last year, while people said, "even the states does not go that far". The EU Data Retention Directive wants (it needs to be ratified by individual countries) to track every phone call made, every email sent, every web site visited, every cell phone location, and hold this data for over a decade. The data would be available to non-governmental organisations (private firms). Anonymous internet usage would be banned. Anonymous prepaid mobile phone cards would be banned. All this, of course, to save us from terrorism and organised crime.
And the UK has constructed a surveillance system that beats anything ever built by the soviet spy states. Every public urban space is monitored, recorded, tracked. The only privacy you have is in your home, where you are safely under house arrest, unable to do anything to damage the interests of the state.
It was just a matter of time before the FBI asked for the same powers. What police force would not? It's a copper's wet dream. Every one of us stinking criminals-in-waiting tracked like cockroaches in a pen. No more crime. No more disorder. No more rebellion.
AMD has, pretty much, wrapped up the high-end market with its Opterons. All the noise about Itanium - it's turned into Opteron sales.
So now Intel has made a strong come-back on the desktop... and AMD calculates, do we make slices of silicon that sell for $100, or that sell for $1,000 and the answer is pretty clear. AMD does not have the capacity that Intel has, so it's making the most out its fabs by aiming at the server market.
A license can crumble, metaphorically, when the problem it solves becomes irrelevant.
The GPLv2, for example, is focussed on the distribution of software. It dates from an era where distribution meant floppy disks, tapes, and perhaps for the very luck, FTP.
But today a lot (most?) software is never actually distributed to users - it is accessed via web services - and the GPL is powerless to force vendors who take GPL'd software and improve it, and embed those improvements into web applications, to release those improvements.
You cannot ask for the source code for a web application that is built on GPL'd software.
That, my friend, is what I mean by "crumble".
If you want to contribute to the GPLv3, you can. The FFII, for example, proposed some changes that would clarify the GPLv3 with respect to patent law in Europe (the current draft is too US-biased).
Torvalds doesn't need to contribute, but I'm glad he's moved to a more neutral stance. The GPLv2 is old and out of date and though it still works today, will start to crumble in a few years.
In every new project my firm does, we end up adding our own conditions onto the GPL3 (for instance for patents) and it'd be far better to have these defined as standard.
It's good to be critical of processes that aren't clear, and it's entirely possible that the FSF won't be able to produce a worthy successor to GPLv2, which is an incredibly important document in the history of software, but we should give them the benefit of the doubt.
IBM's patent lawyers invented software patents in the first place. You can see what they were thinking... "we patent all our hardware, now more and more of those designs are implemented in software, so we should patent software too".
The trouble is, there is no dividing line between a patent for microcode, and a patent for swinging a pizza. The moment you allow the definition of a software model to be patented, you open the gates to patents on every idea. It just takes time - 10 years - before the patent industry assiduously hacks every single definition, but it happens.
IBM is now very unhappy with the patent situation. They have invested hundreds of millions (billions, probably) in their patent portfolio but it mostly covers older technology where there is less and less licensing opportunity. Meanwhile the patent business is creating record turnover, which deflates their patent portfolio.
Yes, IBM is against business process patents. Big deal. Any business process can be reworked as a software patent. Any border that tries to separate the 'good' software patents from the 'bad' ones can be hacked until it's gone.
The only reason large firms like IBM, SAP, and Microsoft still support the software patent model is because their patent policy is dictated by patent attornies. If the CFO or CTO was in charge, it'd be different.
As for the suggestion that patents were "closed" before... bizarre. The whole justification for granting a patent monopoly is to reward the inventor for publishing his work.
If Microsoft bought Sony, they'd own a whole lot of music and movies... I wonder what they'd do with that.
A while back I wrote an article on this.
Patents don't drive innovation, they are what happens when lawyers discover lucrative deposits of innovation sheltering in nice little shaded valleys, and decide to burn down the trees, strip mine the valleys, and extract the last drop of value from the accumulated innovation, creating havoc and destruction in the process.
The sad thing is that governments are convinced that patents are equal to innovation, making the stupid mistake of confusing correlation with causation.
Software patents are not what drives programmers to invent. Software patents are a tool by which lawyers rip-off the IT industry.
Every single time patent law is relaxed (in the US as in Europe) to include more software, you will find IP lawyers steering the process.
It's not just in security but in every domain. Small firms are the ones that innovate best. Big firms are best at exploiting a market.
This is one of the reasons that software patents - which hit small firms disproportionately - are so bad for innovation. Anything that makes life harder for small firms - red tape, software patents, litigation, etc. - is bad for the economy because small-to-medium firms are what keep our economies healthy.