That will change when the patent expires, and my friends and I are going to have a big party somewhere in the Silicon Valley area to celebrate. Check your local Linux user group for the patent expiration party in your area. Over the last year or so, we've heard a lot about how software patents, which became legal in the U.S. in 1981, stifle innovation. And a legal minefield of intersecting patents threatens all software development, free or proprietary. Where the software patent mess intersects with important basic security work such as encryption, software patents interfere with the spread of best practices and can be a major security problem.
Software patents hurt their holders, too, by skewing their view of reality.
Somehow, these patent holders assume that just because people are giving them money, those people must like them. Imagine a group of bandits who camp around a well in a desert and begin charging travelers for water. Real bandits would keep their weapons close by at night. But today's patent bandits seem to think that people want to do business with them. Unisys, for example, owns a software patent on a compression algorithm called LZW, which is used in the Web's obsolete but common GIF file format.