[Patents] simple questions

[PILCH Hartmut phm@a2e.de]

> Look at the number of software products on the market, the number of
> pages of publications for IT, the number of jobs, etc.  All have been
> steadily rising for years, and will only drop for non-patent reasons
> (like the NASDAQ crashing or the Internet mania losing its potency).

For many years, there were only a few software patents around.
The number of patents is now increasing much faster than the number of IT
jobs.
But the IT market is still expanding.
This will however not go on without limits.
When people start getting worried about limited ressources, they will look
at how they can use their by then big patent portfolios to fight off
competitors.
And even while the IT market continues expanding, it will be forced into a
capitalist pattern with investors and patent lawyers determining the
direction.
The days where a small group of people would write a nifty program and
earn money through copyright will be gone, just as the days where people
sooner or later published source code and contributed to a public sphere
of open source software.

Just as Mr Dignatz said in Bruxelles:  if you destroy an ecosystem, it
won't come back again for decades.  And in Europe, this is the ecosystem
that is currently flourishing.  Huge enterprises centered around capital
and lawyers are an American phenomenon, and for long years to come, such
concentration will not take place in Europe but in Silicon Valley.
Moreover, such concentration isn't very productive or helpful in the
software area.

-phm