Why may some big companies want patents, and how to answer them…
- Offshoring software developments.
- The fact: This is a big trend today. Developers in India, China and other places are taking over developments. Developers there are good, they’re numerous, they’re hard-working, they’re low wages, at least from an occidental point of view. So many big software developers are offshoring to India and China these days, very much like they offshored to eastern Europe a few years ago (however eastern developers aren’t that cheap these days, especially compared to far-easterner ones).
- A possible thinking behind: However (may think the big software company strategists), if we do this, sooner or later, once these easterner companies will have their people trained to write our software, they may write and sell these software for themselves, without us, and we (the big western development companies), will have created our own competitors (this is what happened for example to Cisco with Huawei, in my opinion). How do we avoid this ? Here, software patents come to the scene. If we can get a monopoly on the ideas underlying the software, we still can put our development where it’s cheap, and avoid other companies to emerge.
- What’s the answer ? Software patents in this context are a purely illusory protection. The problem here is that development is cheaper there than here, and that the real added value is in writing the software, not in the idea. If they can develop for cheaper, and sell at the same price, they just put more added value, and there’s nothing you can do against that.
