[weeny]

You're being rather misleading. If someone solves a problem in a different way from an existing patent (avoids their claims), their new way is not covered by that patent. Patents definitively can't claim "problems"; instead, they can claim very specific solutions to problems. Any large patent portfolio or broad patent is simply a large house of cards and any good innovator can topple the house of cards by tipping one fundamental claim.

Further, the state of software patents in the U.S. and globally has been brought about not by laws, or by the establishment or the powers that be, but by inventors appealing the USPTO to get their inventions patented. Twenty years ago (the previous generation of tech nerds - the yahoo's even) these people that brought us the internet had to fight for their ability to join the technology landscape through patents.

Now, the common consensus among their descendants - at least the cheeky ones on the internet - is that that work must be destroyed for no other reason than vague opinion.

[brlewis]

Please don't slander the people who brought us the Internet by painting them as software patent advocates.

http://www.ifso.ie/documents/promotion/other-voices.pdf

Vint Cerf: "The openness of those protocols and their availability was key to their adoption and widespread use. I think if Bob [Kahn] and I had not done that - if we had tried to, in some way, constrain and restrict access to those protocols, some other protocol suite would probably be the one we'd be using today .... The fact that it wasn't patented, I think, was very important."

Tim Berners-Lee: "I mention patents in passing, but in fact they are a great stumbling block for Web development. Developers are stalling their eorts in a given direction when they hear rumors that some company may have a patent that may involve the technology."

[weeny]

I never said that TBL or Cerf were patent advocates. I am very familiar with their positions on the subject. Even though they released their work to the public with no restrictions, their work was built on top of a ton of prior art that was patented.

For example TCP IP was a derivative of prior communications protocols either developed for private for-profit enterprise or the defense industry (Xerox, Bell, IBM, etc). In nearly all cases they were patented and exploited, but not really for the public's use; TBL and the other forefathers did have access to (or even helped write) the published prior art though when they were inventing the internet.

So in this case it doesn't really matter whether they were for or against software patents; because without patented prior art they would have had nothing to build off of. The success of their invention did indeed come from their superior execution (releasing it to the public) but since then they have become more hypocritical than Steve Jobs in claiming that software patents would have been a hindrance to the internet.