[jacquesm]

That's got to be the mother of all patent lawsuits to date.

I hope that it will now become clear to the world at large that a patent without any intention to produce a product is simply a waste of time and money. I'd much prefer it if all these patent filing clowns would keep their 'research' locked up in their vaults and called them trade secrets, that would give nobodies like me a chance at just getting on with our jobs without stepping on someones patented toes.

[dminor]

The optimistic side of me hopes that people are seeing the writing on the wall for software patents, and are hoping to extract value before the landscape changes.

[Timothee]

I have a question: what makes software different from other disciplines/domains with regards to patents? Why are "software patents" more often pointed out as pointless than other kinds of patents?

[nex3]

Software patents have a strong tendency to be both vague and obvious. Although these are supposed to make something unpatentable, this doesn't happen in practice with software patents (possibly due to the relative novelty of software and lack of understanding among non-technical people).

[houseabsolute]

More people on the internet both

    - write software, and
    - don't stand to benefit directly from software patents.

Kind of troll, kind of serious. Consider the source and all that. I also think software patents are dumb, but then again I also don't stand to benefit from them and I write software.