Comment by chatmasta

I'm not a lawyer nor a CPA, but my reading of that Cornell link is that the definition only applies to expenditures that the company deducts from their return as R&D expenses, which, again - is not the default strategy of every company.

Note this would also only affect profitable companies (i.e., not most VC-funded startups), since there's nothing to deduct if you didn't make enough profit to owe tax in the first place (modulo some change in definition of "profit" based on how software development must be categorized - but still, this would only affect companies with fairly significant revenue; it's not like hiring a software developer suddenly costs 120% more than it did last year.)