The Long-Term View from LinuxInsider

LinuxInsider commentary from Michael Lee on the benefits of software patentability.

Patents promote innovation. Patents give software companies more incentive to invest in R&D because they allow those companies to protect their inventions. Without patents, a company cannot effectively prevent competitors from incorporating its software inventions into competing products...

It's not that software patents are good, and open-source is bad, or vice versa. Instead, companies should have the right to elect one or the other. Prohibiting software patents means that companies cannot protect their inventions, and thus effectively forces everyone to open-source their software. The open-source leaders' position against software patents seems antithetical to their philosophy of freedom.