Re: [Patents] Re: "Rent Seeking and Innovation"

[Gregory Aharonian <srctran@world.std.com>]

>In the chip business you have to invest in building factories. In
>software you don't.

Obviously you know nothing about the chip business.  There are many
companies in the chip business that are nothing more than a bunch
of programmers using circuit design tools.  They program their new
circuit designs in languages like Verilog or SystemC, and then sell
their designs to other companies to manufacture or embed into products.

In the United States, sales and licensing of such designs, is a
business worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year, as is the
sales of such programming tools.

And indeed as hardware/software codesign tools become more powerful,
more chip people will end up behaving little different from the
software people.  And as Field Programmable Gate Array technology
becomes more powerful, chip people will have an alternative method
to getting their designs into people's products.

Once again, nothing special about software.  Just another technology
using tools to make products.

Greg Aharonian