[adrian_b]

Yes, anyone who obtains a software patent is just a cheater, because they take advantage of the fact that now it is possible to obtain patents for things that could not be patented a half of century before.

If at the start of the computing industry it would have been possible to obtain the kind of software patents that are awarded now, nobody would have ever been able to write any programs without infringing patents, including those who now claim the right of forbidding to others to rediscover the same trivial methods for which they happened to file patent applications before others, mainly because nobody before them thought that such things are worthy of a patent.

If to their predecessors would have been granted the same kinds of software patents as today, none of those wanting to obtain software patents now could have been working in the computing industry, as it would have been much smaller.

Even the smallest physical design or computer program embodies numerous ideas that fortunately were discovered in a time when for anyone who discovered something new, the priority was to make it known to the public, without expecting many rewards besides the recognition of priority in advancement of science and technology.