[Joeri]

"People who do ground breaking research need to have a way of protecting their intellectual property"

Define "ground-breaking".

This is the myth of the patent system: the lone inventor doing dazzling unprecedented work that they can only recoup by being granted a patent. Those people don't exist. You may find one or two, but not enough to justify the overbearing patent system.

[zmmmmm]

And to extend the argument (as in the article), if those same people can't actually sell their inventions because of interlocking patents held by competitors then the patents they do hold aren't much use.

The idea of a patent is heavily predicated on one novel advance in an otherwise freely implementable design. But in software that is (or threatens to become) a myth rather than a reality.