Very little of a student’s formal education in computing involves the noise that comes in from the real world: constraints, politics, economics. Software patents are a beautiful example of something that your typical computer science graduate probably has opinions on, but doesn’t know nearly enough about how they came to be, why they’re here to stay, or what it would really take to change the system.
In short, the laws surrounding software patent law were created by lawyers, and I’d suspect that many of those lawyers were not savvy to the practice of computing. They certainly were clued into big industry (software or otherwise), and true to too many American moves of late, software patent law does much more to protect the Haves, and provides little equity for the Have Nots.
Consider the closing note from Kieren McCarthy’s Register article on the subject of European patent law:
If, for example, it was explained to Arlene McCarthy that changing the rules will create more problems than it would solve; that 13,000 existing patents will effectively be wiped out, irritating European businesses; that innovation and business will be stifled by expensive legal fights; that the very existence of the open source movement points to the fact that software is a special case where collaboration is more effective that protection; that European businesses will be worse off as a result because US companies hold the majority of the patents and the patent know-how… well, then we might just have seen a different result.
In a word, techies don’t know politics. And in the Information Age, if the techs aren’t going to learn the ways of the world, then the world will have it’s way with the techs.
Good luck, Europe. If you haven’t figured it out by now, the American Way only serves one nation under God, and that’s America. I suspect Kieren’s analysis is right, and small- to mid-sized Eurpean companies will take it in the rear over this change in Eurpean software patent law. You can bet IBM, Sun, and Microsoft will do just fine, however.