[discojesus]

awesome things like making it illegal to sell Word and therefore Office

How about just making your open source alternative to Word and Office that much better and competing with them?

* edit: downmodded without justification. Wonderful. Which just forces the quality of discussion on HN WAY down. Ironically, understanding that concept requires understanding incentives, which are the basis of patents in the first place :)

[philwelch]

I downmodded you because you demonstrated a total misunderstanding of cookiecaper's point, quoted him out of context, and made a totally irrelevant response. He wasn't making any kind of attack or criticism against Microsoft Word or Office, he was arguing that this kind of disruptive litigation will provide an impetus to lobby against software patents.

[ericb]

The problem with your just simply build your own open source competitor theory, aside from being a glib response, is that you are quite likely to be violating a patent Microsoft or someone else holds when you build said system.

Complaining about downvoting is itself noise, which will generally only get you downvoted further.

[ghshephard]

discojesus - the ENTIRE point of patenting "Office/Excel/Spreashdeet/Word" processes and systems is to PREVENT open source alternatives to Word and Office.

We're talking about _patents_, not copyrights here. Nobody is suggesting that Software Copyrights aren't perfectly valid and an important part of the industry - without even having to Poll, I'm going to guess that 90% of HN residents are strong proponents of Software Copyrights. The Free-Software proponents, even those on the GPL V3 bandwagon, _rely_ on Copyrights to further their aims and ambitions.