Software Patents -- Bad News for Every Company

by Lynne Ellyn

I have spent the last 25-plus years in IT. I have worked in healthcare, manufacturing, high tech, and the energy industry. I have programmed in Assembler, COBOL, Fortran, ALGOL, RPG, C, C++, Smalltalk, LISP, and Pascal. The first database technology I learned was TOTAL, and the first telecommunications technology I used was Taskmaster. Along the way, I've used IMS DB/DC, IDMS, DB2, Focus, Sybase, Oracle, Informix, and GemStone. The organizations that I have managed have supported thousands of packages as well as several pretty arcane programming and scripting languages. In other words, I have seen a significant number of business problems addressed by software. The myriad software programs that I have known have been developed by quite diverse groups of people. Many of the software developers in manufacturing spent their whole career in manufacturing -- often with a single company. Ditto for the healthcare and energy industries.