Judges and juries will be asked to rule on whether a large complicated program, potentially millions of lines long, written in an obscure computer language, violates an arcane patent. The claimed violation will be built into the very fiber of the program, hidden within the program's structure and data in complex and subtle ways. One expert will say one thing, another expert will say the opposite, neither judge nor jury will be competent to understand the nature or veracity of the patent, much less which expert is closer to the truth. The patent will have been issued by an examiner who is not expert in the specific software field and might not understand the concepts essential to operating systems, fuzzy logic, or whatever the specific field is, much less the prior art. The chances of a fair and informed decision will be vanishingly small.
Software is, perhaps, more analogous to literature and music than it is to mechanical invention.
It would be silly to think about patenting the first-person novel or the sonata form, yet there are software patents already that to a software engineer are just as absurd. As a software company CEO, I am perfectly content to compete based on the quality of the software we create and the support we provide for it. I am fully satisfied with copyright, contract and trade-secret protection for the software we write. We have begun to work on some patent applications because I think we may need them for defensive purposes, but I would far rather we didn't need to do so. If software patents become prevalent, it will seriously interfere with our ability to continue improving our products and our ability to continue developing new ones.