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Comment by Isofarro | Hacker News Reader

Replace "Yahoo" with "Microsoft", and "Facebook" with "Yahoo", and you have basically the same justification given to me as a Yahoo employee to patent my (company internal) hack-day ideas.

The engineering manager responsible said Yahoo would only use patents as a defensive measure, to defend themselves against patent threats from other companies. Same promises, same logic. Two years later Yahoo launched their software patent action against Facebook.

Software patents can only be used offensively. Because their defensive capability is limited to the threat of using them offensively. If there is no substance to the threat they are useless. So the value of software patents rests solely on their offensive capability.

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Software patents are the nuclear weapons of the software industry. If you don't have them, you're at the mercy of those who do. But even if you get them with deterrence in mind, it can still be used offensively - and if it falls into the hands of someone with nothing to lose (a terrorist group with no homeland/patent troll, aka non-practising entity, hence immune to countersuits) none of the deterrence works. In short we'd all be better off if they just didn't exist

An investment of $550 million that is only "for defensive purposes only" is BS. Company policies change all the time especially if a new market competitor emerges.

Here's a question though. Let's say you're a startup investor and you have a choice to acquire one startup and one startup uses react and one uses vue.js both have stable apps and both have the same revenue which one would you choose.

Generally M&A involves due diligence; which involves assessing the business and the technology. It aims to summarize assets and liabilities. It would surprise me significantly if a viable product was not acquired because of a technology choice; a viable product rarely hinges on one piece of technology -- the acquirer is likely to make it a goal of the acquired company to change some tech (react-> some equivalent) if they really view this as a significant liability.

IANAL :) but was once acqui-hired by a patent troll.

Genuinely ignorant question: couldn't a company file for a patent, and then open-source it? (not sure if open-source is even the right terminology)

I'm picturing a scenario where the idea is patented, but the patent holder reserves no rights on it, de-weaponizing the patent.

Thus no one else can patent the idea and use it offensively nor is there a question of the original patent holder "turning evil" and using the patent as a weapon.

In 1956 At&T was forced to license all it's patents as part of a deal with the government to remain a monopoly. This is called a compulsory license. A company could do this and simple not charge a fee for the patent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_license#Patents

> Software patents can only be used offensively.

Well, not really. This exists:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Invention_Network
  http://www.openinventionnetwork.com/

"The best defense..."

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