My personal pledge is that as a programmer I refuse to work for any company that goes on the attack with software patents, this obviously includes Apple and Microsoft. I also refuse to participate if asked by my company to help create a patent, I am willing to be fired over this.
Since good programmers are a scarce resource if enough of us took this pledge it could really start having an effect.
The problem with that worldview, is that Patents play a number of very important defensive and value creating roles in a small company, that is not related, whatsoever, to their use in an offensive (in both senses of the word) manner.
"We do advise the companies we fund to apply for patents, but not so they can sue competitors. Successful startups either get bought or grow into big companies. If a startup wants to grow into a big company, they should apply for patents to build up the patent portfolio they'll need to maintain an armed truce with other big companies. If they want to get bought, they should apply for patents because patents are part of the mating dance with acquirers."
That's the type of pragmatic individual reasoning that collectively just perpetuates and reinforces the current system. If we can't rely on government then the only way to change it is by being unreasonable.
The thing about being a leader, or a bellwether, is that you need to walk outside the mainstream, be just a little bit crazier than your colleagues, but not so crazy our out of the mainstream that you leave everyone behind.
PG's position is clearly not in the mainstream of the business world (though, one might argue that, if anything, he's more conservative than his hacker audience) - but he's close enough to their interests that he may encourage followers. Or not. That's always the risk of being a leader - you may step out, and people may not follow.
He does speak to their interests which is, "If you want to hire great developers, you should align your corporate ethos with the best and brightest that you want to attract" - and, in general, large companies virtually never, ever, sue _small_ companies for _software_ patents - so they have little to risk.
When I was writing software patents for a living, programmers hated talking to me. They considered it a total waste of time at best. That's part of the reason I decided to switch sides and do a startup instead ;)
Software inventions, no matter how original, should never be patented. Where would we be if someone had patented web-crawling or unit testing or hyperlinks or MVC? Plenty of people are getting rich, tons of innovation is going on. What are software patents supposed to be good for?
> Software inventions, no matter how original, should never be patented
Why not?
The whole idea of patents is to prevent trivial duplication of results that were achieved through considerable research expense. I don't really see much difference between spending a lot of time on getting a mechanical design right or developing and testing a drug or researching a sophisticated algorithm.
Since good programmers are a scarce resource if enough of us took this pledge it could really start having an effect.