<i>Without patents, there&#x27;s little incentive to innovate unless you can throw enough money at a startup to get dominant market share before someone else copies you.</i><p>I don&#x27;t believe this matches what we know of history. It also doesn&#x27;t match personal experience -- I&#x27;ve worked on open source projects because they&#x27;re fun, and on trying to grow better ETL tools because they make the rest of my job easier.<p>It probably does change <i>who</i> does the innovating, tho. Patents mean that instead of people innovating things to make their own lives easier, you get outsiders throwing money at trying to innovate around what they&#x27;ve guessed other people&#x27;s problems to be.