Am I evil, or is killing patents just plain fun?
Why is it with patents everything has to be nothing ever, never a good reason?  I'm sure my perspective here might get this downvoted to oblivion, but really, think for a second what would happen if tomorrow, no software was patentable?  Why would a large company focus any effort on R&D, new idea development, vs investing that money in just ripping off the competition and scaling it better? (not that that ever happens as is..)  There are lots of us that make our living designing or developing things that some business or shareholder wants developed simply because they want to be the ones that did it, or did it in a way no one else could steal.<p>I don't think zero patents for software is a great idea, but I also don't think the lawyerization of patents has helped anyone long term.  Perhaps a better approach is to get actual developers and software professionals in patent approval/dispute resolution positions?  A parallel to that might be the advent of the Test Engineer or the Dev Ops positions.  Test Engineering showed the world the value someone with development skills could have over classic point and try to break testing, just as Dev Ops showed what having some dev chops does for deployment/network infrastructure.