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Comment by CuriousSkeptic | Hacker News Reader

"Designing around patents is, in fact, one of the ways in which the patent system works to the advantage of the public in promoting progress in the useful arts, its constitutional purpose."

To me that just sounds stupid. It's akin to the argument that breaking windows promtes growth by stimulating the glass industry.

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It's doublespeak. Like the CNN article whose title reads "Encryption a growing threat to security".

In software, working around existing patents has resulted in vast fragmentation on every platform. Thereby greatly increasing the time investment needed per developer when creating cross platform compatible apps.

Want to reach your audience with a simple app? Learn to use all of the native android dev suite tools and language. Learn all of the native iOS dev suite too. Make a Web app. Make that web app compatible for all browser platforms: IE, Mozilla, Chrome, Safari. Make that web app responsive for mobile users for all the different device types they might be using...

If you want to stimulate innovation, cooperation is imperative. A cooperative society would realize that the more unified and open your innovation processes are, the less time investment is needed for everyone else.

Not really, when you consider that the vast majority of will take the path of least resistance, and that innovation is often a risky and expensive effort most would rather eschew.

There are many examples of innovation-by-forced-workaround happening. Consider the fact that development of Ogg Vorbis languished until the MP3 patents started getting licensed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis). This kicked the Ogg Vorbis project into overdrive, resulting in a format and codec that many consider superior to MP3.

Here's another example, from Stallman himself: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-mec-india.html - he recounts an example of where they had to work around the LZW patents, resulting in GZIP, which "gave better compression results". This further eventually led to the creation of PNG when the GIF patent was asserted. The clear implication, of course, is that they'd have preferred re-using LZW (as all good coders should), but then they would not have invented GZIP and PNG.

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