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Comment by nickpsecurity | Hacker News Reader

Most of the patents files for software are by big companies. Most innovations come from startups, academics, and volunteers in FOSS. Most of it was protected by copyright law with money recouped in licensing and acquisitions.

Now try to understand why innovation existed outside patent motivations. Then look up what big companies do with all those patents. Only then will you see the real effect of the patent system.

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Universities are big filers of patents, so that leaves startups and FOSS. The latter do a lot of innovative application, but not much invention. If you look at something like a smart phone. The UI was developed at a big company, using ideas originally developed at big corporate R&D labs. The CPU and wireless chips were all designed at big companies. The LCD and touch screen technology is all developed at big companies. The only big FOSS part (the Linux core of Android), is a clone of something (UNIX), invented in a big corporate R&D lab.

Even with your counters, it seems innovation would continue via academic grant money and R&D by big companies for differentiation.

FOSS has its fair share of research. You just don't hear about it as often as you hear about the more engineering-focused FOSS projects, for the same reasons you don't hear about the research projects big companies do as much as their flagship engineering projects. (How many people have heard of Midori compared to Windows? I'd wager it's the same ratio, speaking in orders of magnitude, as the number of people who have heard of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler vs. GCC, both of which are FOSS. I could name many other examples just in the PL domain.)

Now you might say that a lot of those open source research projects are funded by big companies, so they don't count. But most development on popular open source projects is funded by big or medium-size companies. Research isn't any different in this regard.

I think it's no accident that most of your examples are hardware, not software. The problem there is that open source hardware is difficult to make work, not that open source research is difficult to make work. The other main example you gave is Unix, but FOSS didn't exist in 1973--of course it wasn't open source by the modern definition. Its research successor, Plan 9, was open source.

Disclaimer: I work on one of those open source research projects.

> Most innovations come from startups, academics, and volunteers in FOSS.

Not sure you can lump 3 very different types of entities into one group.

I agree with your 1st type (startups) but what about #2 (academics) and #3 (FOSS volunteers) - what are some examples that "most innovations" come from them?

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