If you produce software – any kind of software – the issue of patents has probably come up. The fact is that it is impossible to produce a piece of software that actually does anything practical without infringing on at least one patent – and for complex systems, probably hundreds of them.
Let’s say you wanted to write a quick program to index music collections. Congratulations, you’ve just run afoul of… umm, let’s see… I count at least four patents for that, at a glance. What about indexing images? Well, depending on how you do it there are at least 30 patents that apply to that.
Think of something obvious you can do with software. There’s a patent for that. Probably a lot of them. You probably owe someone money.
Full post: Impossible software