[gte910h]

I have worked in defense. Getting a patent was like "Oooh, that's cool". Finding out if there were patents in the way to do anything was weeks of supporting legal's searches.

I'm sure someone, somewhere, at some level, likes patents. I don't think it's engineers though.

[rayiner]

I also worked in defense. The company was run by engineering PhD's and the end result of millions of dollars of R&D and man-years of labor was a set of patents.

Your line engineers aren't going to get super excited about patents, because they're not compensated for their innovation (that's a separate rant), but it wasn't my assertion that they'd come to a rousing defense of software patents. Rather, they're not going to come out to a rousing opposition to software patents like Groklaw claims.

[tracker1]

As far as pure software development (not using at that point integrated custom hardware) as an idea to form, I haven't seen anything in over twenty years that deserves a patent. That includes audio, video and other compression systems that build on algorithms that are over two decades old. Those systems that tightly work with specialized hardware are a bit of a different story.

As far as any system that is defined only in software, and capable of running on a generic computer, with generic input/output devices of today are not, imho, patentable. Anything that involves an obvious idea implemented in an obvious way is not patentable, of which the incredible majority of software is. Again, exception to interfacing specialized hardware...

[gte910h]

You mean "They won't publicly say they dislike something their company likes" That's true, for some of them. Others I can still see them saying "patents are more trouble than they're worth because they're outspoken types.