Software in the courts

Here's an interesting essay with a viewpoint on software patents that you don't often get.

I sat in a conference room with my co-founders and a couple of patent attorneys and told them what we’d created. They took notes and created nonsensical documents that I still can’t make sense of.

It would be hard to believe, if I hadn't heard this exact story, in almost identical words, from multiple different engineers that I trust deeply.

I thought I was giving them a shield, but turns out I gave them a missile with my name permanently engraved on it.

The only people getting rich off this are the lawyers.

Meanwhile, in other similar, but unrelated, software-in-the-courts news, Judge William Alsup just entered an order setting April 16, 2012 as the definitive trial date for Oracle v. Google at the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.