[frugalfirbolg]

I'm still looking for good literature, but intuitively I feel that small companies could still take advantage of patents for software in the original spirit of the patent system.

Also, I wonder if they intend on the working code examples to be included with the public patent after approval? If so then this would in a sense make all patented software open source, albeit with a very restrictive license. Still, that could vastly accelerate innovation and streamline arbitration.

In the end I think item 7, the proposal to research whether there is any economic benefit from software patents, is the most important and they should narrow down their scope to just that.