Can the Microsoft Office Ribbon be used by other developers? (2018)

This is an old issue since XP (iirc?) and I remember it as one of the first reason that pushed me to hypothesize: "patent law is broken. worldwide. it's no longer serving its purpose, it is actually detrimental to its first and second mission¹".

Pretty much a landslide confirmation ever since. A sad topic for all makers of this world. We should be able to massively distribute "patent" law nowadays (it's no longer a tech problem to track all the involvement), give some sanity back to this system.

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¹ First purpose of patent law, historically, is to incentivize innovation by guaranteeing inventors a revenue from their work. Same thing for copyright with artists. This is different from trademarks which are artistic but not tech, rather commercial/marketing in nature (literaly: branding).

Second purpose of patent law is indeed to incentivize innovation, by virtue of the first purpose (that inventors can thrive economically, get paid retrospectively for the work). It's important to make a distinction, because 1 is not the only way to reach 2, but it was deemed morally fair. Nowadays we may notice that 1 has become somewhat predatory to 2, and it's not individual inventors (like it used to be when such laws were made, and thusly justified) but big corporations that tend to extract "rent" from paper (there is no "spirit" of invention when you can simply buy patents with a company, this is a really grey idea that you could legally do that; another view would have any failed company's patents restituted to the public if it can't be held back to the name of the people who actually worked it).