The fight between proprietary software and free software is no new. The topic is always red hot for debates and has always invited fury from the open source or free users.
The patents are copyrights and date back to 200 years. The ideology backing the concept was to save the new ideas invented by one. It was brought into the force to save the new ideas so that no other third party can exploit that without the permission of the originator or at least earning some royalty for the latter. But as the time grows, every concept needs renovation. The issues that once were good for development and have secure opinion attached to them are now more or less considered rigid.
Each industry has its own standards and statistics. The nature of software industry is poles apart from any other industry and for it patents are proving gradually harmful. The idea of software patent is significant as far as it promotes the originality and innovation but contrasts to it, software patents are road blockers for innovation. They harm the creativity and an aspiration to create something naive.
The software products for all applications undergoes the same life cycle. In such cases maintaining originality with concept is a bottleneck. It harms the innovation and mere thought of suing due to patent infringement is yet another big obstacle. But start ups are never sued for patent infringements as a matter of fact. If they come up with something better that can harm the existing company on the same grounds, then they can be pulled to the lawsuits battle zone. For instance the companies like Microsoft has lot of patents signed in their name, but no cases have been heard of Microsoft suing the other company as of mimicking their software or something else.
Such companies have broader aspect to look and define patent infringement. To them patents are the ways to protect their innovative software to be cloned and sold by some other company in their name. They do not believe in filing a lawsuit against a company merely because they have borrowed their idea. This is what should be the real idea.
People should learn patents are to protect the original creation of somebody so that it cannot be used by the third party for minting money but it should not be a hurdle to create something new which is inspired by the previous one. The bigger companies do not like to sue the smaller ones, if they go this way as per market watchers they have lost the real charisma and hence the battle. As a matter of fact, if your startup grows big enough, however, you’ll start to get sued, no matter what you do.
But the question that strikes much to mind, why only software patents are evil?
The reasons for it might be many; one being the software and technological innovations change at very faster pace, the pace which is much faster than the body involved to allocate patents. Till the time they understood software, many change cycles have undergone.
Second could be that software is so complicated that protecting them by patent is a hard job to accomplish. Third can be that software world is so creative and vast that it is free from physical appearances and if the underlying code seems copied you are in trouble.
The crux is that software patents prove evil if they ruin the innovation. They should not be stringent enough to give chance to start ups to bring in something new by using the code in a different manner thus implementing it a different way, as open source does. Open Source software professionals are the biggest rivals of software patents as they find them blockers for the new innovations coming their way.
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