Comment by summarity
24 days ago
I agree in general, but can think of at least one counterpoint: https://terathon.com/blog/decade-slug.html
Actually novel implementation is protected, paid the author's bills, and was dedicated to the public domain recently - no massive corp involved.
I’m happy for the author, but I feel like that blog post kind of supports parent commenter’s argument. It sounds like Slug would’ve been created even if patents were not a thing. They had their own use case for it, and that usecase alone was enough for the R&D investment. So patents did not encourage innovation in this case. In e.g. medicine, not having patents could arguably mean that companies don’t do as much R&D.
Seems the author made it public domain not because that'd be the best for the software industry at large, but because "holding on to it any longer benefits nobody", which means the amount they earn from it monetarily is today minuscule compared to what it was.
Parents point seems to be about that if this author of Slug wouldn't have patent it in the first place, then in general that work would have had an larger impact in the software industry, compared to this situation where the author did patent it.
Case(s) in point: all the comments on HN who independently came up with the same algorithm but couldn't publish it as FOSS because they found a patent covering it.