Back in the early 1980’s as a teenage pomological engineer in Connecticut, I had a chance to participate in a demonstration of VisiCalc, one of the most revolutionary software products ever.
VisiCalc was the original spreadsheet, which was later sold to Lotus and made Lotus 1-2-3 the de facto standard for number crunching.
Unfortunately for VisiCalc, they talked about getting a patent coverage at the time but their patent attorney counseled them not to do so, citing the state of the patent laws regarding software at that time.
Having been through all of that, Dan Bricklin, one of the creators of VisiCalc, has taken a very pragmatic view of software patents:
That said, I also feel that no matter how much you might feel that patents don’t work for the software industry, and how much you may take up the torch to change the law, it is the law today and a fact of programming life as much as Microsoft, the instruction set of the machine we write for, the turning of the century number, and the need to pay for food. Ignoring them won’t make them go away, nor protect you from those that do not have the same beliefs.
