Quote Originally Posted by NatLWalker View Post
How you can equate things like IntelliSense and Edit-and-Continue to the Quadratic Formula and Theory of Relativity is beyond my comprehension.
My point was that patenting concepts is a bit of a joke. I can understand the rationale behind patenting devices (something physical) but I cannot see any valid reason to patent the theory behind. For instance I would agree that patenting a processus to create a tyre and the machinery involved makes (some) sense (though the investment needed to actually take advantage of that knowledge is a much higher barrier than a patent in such a case) whereas patenting the concept of a tyre and the laws used to describe it (in mechanical and/or chemical terms) would be downright insane IMO.

By the way I was more thinking about things like differential/integral calculus, Fourier Transform, electromagnetic waves (by far the most widely used data transmission vector nowadays), and such...

Anyway your examples are quite interesting because anyone can come up with the concepts and a fair amount of people are able to implement them on their own. As an example some Edyuk users consider that the code completion I wrote bests IntelliSense while I had never even heard of IntelliSense before they mentioned it, and my code is far from perfect which basically means that the amount of money and the number of experimented developers involved in a project does not directly correlate to the quality of the final product. Now what's the link with patenting? Well, big companies can afford to patent things and sue people afterwards whereas individuals can't. As a consequence even if a talented individual write a piece of code that outperforms any existing equivalent he can still be crushed by the patents violation claims of a company who would righteously protect its "innovation".

A typical example of the nasty effect of patents that I saw on a forum : someone wrote a research paper on physical simulation and mentioned it may be patented. All serious forum users, most of which were working in a field that related more or less directly to physics simulation, avoided reading that thread to make sure none of their works could ever be considered as derivatives of that research paper. Now can you pretend that this encourages innovation?

OpenSource developers are too keen on borrowing innovations, instead of creating their own
I think this sentence would be a lot nearer to truth I you just replaced OpenSource with Microsoft but I might be biased.