| I believe we would have released open source FPGAs and the accompanying toolchain about 18 years ago if it wasn't for patents. I was getting quite into it, but the patent minefield made it financially too worrying to continue, and it also put off potential collaborators at the time. People literally warned me "you will lose your home - I'm not willing to take that risk". I didn't have a home to lose :p but it was still a downer. And a novel high performance x86 CPU design. x86 is patented thoroughly, although now it ought to be ok to ship one that has the features from about 20 years ago. I would still recommend to be cautious! And an ARM one. ARM is known to some in the field as a company with an army of lawyers after all. A lot of innovation happens when patents expire. Other people's open source FPGA designs are shipping now (and kudos to the designers - they are really well implemented!), in part thanks to many of the basic patents on FPGAs expiring about now. I would be quite surprised if RISC-V implementations aren't dependent on a number of key patents having expired by now. FDM 3D printing (where hot plastic is squirted through a moving nozzle) became popular when the patents on it expired. Some people into open source 3D printing think it happened because that's when people innovated. They did innovate at making it low cost, but the expiry of the patents was a factor too. At the moment I'm building a specialised high-performance database engine, and I have to explicitly avoid some of the obvious on-disk data layouts because they turn out to be patented. It's annoying having to come up with some "clever" alternative, but I'll find a way. I don't know if patents encourage innovation on balance, but they've definitely prevented me from shipping some fairly advanced things I've worked on in the past. I don't begrudge the companies or the system, but I will argue that there is plenty of innovation impeded by it, and in my experience I have never worked anywhere that patents helped, only places where they hindered. It could happen but it hasn't yet. When I discussed this with a patent attorney once, there was a fascinating gulf between people who dream up patentable (or already patented) solutions almost casually on demand when faced with a problem, and people who think this is impossible and such insights are precious gems that rarely occur. I'm sure it differs between fields, and I know there are some very clever patents. But in software and to an extent hardware, the two fields I'm most familiar with, most patents seem to cover natural solutions to a problem which would occur to anyone skilled in the area when faced with that particular problem. |