This is taken from http://archive.org/ and originally appeared at http://www.panopticoncentral.net/archive/2004/11/20/2321.aspx
##Software patents In the wake of the IsNot patent brouhaha, aside from the "you are scum" comments, people have had several reasonable questions about my own feelings about the situation. So let me pause and talk about software patents for a moment. Lest there be any question about this, what follows are my own personal feelings about the matter and have nothing to do with official Micorosoft policy.
Personally, I don't believe software patents are a good idea. I realize that algorithms lie in that grey area between a mechanical process (which is patentable) and an abstract idea (which is not), but at a purely practical level I think that software patents generally do much more harm than good. As such, I'd like to see them go away and the US patent office focus on more productive tasks. I have nothing but contempt for any company that tries to use patents to achieve what they could not through purely competitive means. This includes Microsoft, should they ever choose to do so or have they ever chosen to do so. (I'm not aware of any such situation, but I'm hardly omniscient.)
However, software patents do exist. So while the good fight goes on to get rid of them, I also believe that it would be dangerously naive to not play the game as best we can in the meantime in as principled a way as possible. There are a lot of people who would love nothing more than to just take a piece out of Microsoft either because they can or because they want to get rich and not for any better reason than that. I've been around long enough to see the kind of trouble that patents can cause us, and so I believe the best defense is a good offense. While I don't believe in using patents in an unprovoked way, I do believe in having a robust patent arsenal with which to defend ourselves should someone get it in their head that they want to hold our products hostage for money or just to cause trouble.
One of the most unfortunate aspect of the software patent system is that there is a distinct advantage, should you have the money to do so, to try and patent everything under the sun in the hopes that something will stick. If someone has a patent on "a biological system used to aspirate oxygen gases to fuel biological processes" (i.e. lungs), I wouldn't be surprised. (If there isn't, no fair submitting the patent before me!) This is bad both because it jams up a system that's not really equipped to handle software patents well in the first place and because it increases the likelihood of broad, random patents slipping through the system. Microsoft has been as much a victim of this as anyone else, and yet we're right there in there with everyone else, playing the game. It's become a Mexican standoff, and there's no good way out at the moment short of a broad consensus to end the game at the legislative level.
So that's how I feel about software patents in general. As far as the specific IsNot patent goes, I will say that at a personal level, I do not feel particularly proud of my involvement in the patent process in this case. Beyond that, there's not much to say: many comments addressed legal questions which I am woefully unqualified to comment on and for which speculation would be very
follow-up: http://panopticoncentral.net/2012/02/16/software-patents-revisited/