<i>&gt;Sadly, some of them profit (immensely) from putting up that huge barrier for smaller companies to compete with them.</i><p>Patents go both ways. Studies that while patent thickets may discourage entry [1], this effect is limited, and smaller companies are more likely to enter the same markets (and succeed) if they have patents themselves [1, 2, 3, 4].<p><i>&gt; Oracle gets to claim $9B for 37 methods in the Android code.</i><p>This has nothing to do patents and everything to do with copyright licenses like the GPL. And just to be pedantic, it&#x27;s 37 whole packages. And without this, Google would have been rip off Sun&#x27;s hard work of building a developer base for Java. &quot;Free software&quot; should not mean &quot;freeloading&quot;.<p><i>&gt; Apple gets to sue Samsung over icons, among other things.</i><p>And without those, as ridiculous as they are, Samsung would have gotten away with ripping off Apple wholesale.<p><i>&gt; Being Open Source friendly isn&#x27;t about releasing code under liberal licenses. It is about the commitment to software freedom.</i><p>False dichotomy: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11583749" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11583749</a><p>1. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;people.bu.edu&#x2F;cockburn&#x2F;cockburn_macgarvie_entry_and_patenting_in_software.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;people.bu.edu&#x2F;cockburn&#x2F;cockburn_macgarvie_entry_and_p...</a><p>2. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;papers.ssrn.com&#x2F;sol3&#x2F;papers.cfm?abstract_id=510103" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;papers.ssrn.com&#x2F;sol3&#x2F;papers.cfm?abstract_id=510103</a><p>3. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;papers.ssrn.com&#x2F;sol3&#x2F;papers.cfm?abstract_id=989592" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;papers.ssrn.com&#x2F;sol3&#x2F;papers.cfm?abstract_id=989592</a><p>4. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;papers.ssrn.com&#x2F;sol3&#x2F;papers.cfm?abstract_id=926204" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;papers.ssrn.com&#x2F;sol3&#x2F;papers.cfm?abstract_id=926204</a>