[zabar]

The current dance around the broken patent system look something like this :

- When you are small, nobody will come to get you because you are not interesting enough for troll of big compagnies (except maybe other direct competitor but it's unlikely)

- Then you become bigger and you will have to deal with licenses from other compagnies and trolls.

- At that point you become defensive, and start to patent things yourself.

- Then you are unwilling to fight against patents because it starts to be an asset for you. And you might even be tempted to go to the dark side and use them to attack other companies at this point.

The good news in all that is that when you are a small company in software, you should not worry too much about patent. I don't remember any startup failing because of that...