Posted on 07/15/2011 5:22:37 AM PDT by bvw
I’m old enough to remember a time before the Internet. I know what it’s like to develop software both with and without a worldwide network.
Little has changed with the process of software development since the 1980’s. Of course there have been improvements in our tools and techniques, but the basic act of creating software products is much the same. What has changed dramatically in the past 30 years is how we distribute our creations.
In the days where software was distributed on magnetic media, such as reels of tape, cassettes, or floppy disks, it cost a lot of money to get the product to a customer. As a result, large companies and software publishers were the only ones with the financial resources to get these applications into a retail channel. There were very few independent software developers; and those who did exist were very small operations.
Then along came the Internet and everything changed. Distribution was suddenly cheap.
I remember a conversation with my good friend Cabel Sasser a few years ago. He and I were reminiscing about our first foray into online distribution and were surprised that we had the same initial reaction: “Holy crap! We can put our software on the Internet and people will actually buy it!”
Many other developers had this same experience and began leaving large companies to work on their own. Making a good living while having the freedom to work on their passion was a great life.
Now distribution is going mainstream with the App Store. And it’s already begun changing the lives and businesses of independent software developers. On the surface, it all looks good. There are more customers, increased revenues, and many great new products.
But this expanded distribution is also putting our business at risk: there are people in this new market who claim a right to a part of our hard work. Either by patent or copyright infringement, developers are finding this new cost of litigation to be onerous.
The scary part is that these infringements can happen with any part of our products or websites: things that you’d never imagine being a violation of someone else’s intellectual property. It feels like coding in a mine field.
From our experience, it’s entirely possible that all the revenue for a product can be eaten up by legal fees. After years of pouring your heart and soul into that product, it’s devastating. It makes you question why the hell you’re in the business: when you can’t pay salaries from product sales, there’s no point in building it in the first place.
So, just as in the days of magnetic media, the independent developer now finds him or herself at a point where it is again becoming very expensive to distribute their products to a mass market. This time the retail channel itself is very cheap, but the ancillary costs, both financially and emotionally, are very high.
And, of course, only large companies and publishers can bear these costs. My fear is that It’s only a matter of time before developers find the risks and expenses prohibitive and retreat to the safety of a larger organization. We’ll be going back to square one.
Over the years many of the top selling apps have been created by independent developers, starting with Steve Demeter and Trism at the App Store launch, and continuing to this day with titles like Tiny Wings by Andreas Illiger.
Losing that kind of talent and innovation to a legal system is the real crime.
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Key section:
Now distribution is going mainstream with the App Store. And it’s already begun changing the lives and businesses of independent software developers. On the surface, it all looks good. There are more customers, increased revenues, and many great new products.
But this expanded distribution is also putting our business at risk: there are people in this new market who claim a right to a part of our hard work. Either by patent or copyright infringement, developers are finding this new cost of litigation to be onerous.
The scary part is that these infringements can happen with any part of our products or websites: things that you’d never imagine being a violation of someone else’s intellectual property. It feels like coding in a mine field.
From our experience, it’s entirely possible that all the revenue for a product can be eaten up by legal fees. After years of pouring your heart and soul into that product, it’s devastating. It makes you question why the hell you’re in the business: when you can’t pay salaries from product sales, there’s no point in building it in the first place.
Please tell you legislators that copyright and patent laws and law-like regulations MUST by loosened up, not tightened up, in order to unleash innovation again.
To do anything in this environment you have to be big enough to have a huge legal department. They in turn can guide the various other departments in compliance. Insurance requirements must be maintained and insurance is based on complying with OSHA and EPA and all the other various nefarious agencies and their rules and regulations. Now comes Obamacare to put the final Kibosh on anything but Monster Generic Multinational Corporations who are in a partnership with the government. No wonder unemployment will be higher than the great depression.
not a single industry has escaped being upended by the information revolution.
McLuhan warned you, old timer, 50 years ago. Maybe it's time you checked out his thesis. And dealt with it.
few people are as bitter and grumpy as aging programmers.
As a contract manager for a DoD contractor, I can tell you that the premise of this argument just isn’t true. We have numerous independent consultants we sub this type of work to. If you truly have the knowledge and skills to provide sole source work, opportunities are infinite to strike out on your own.
It’s doesn’t matter if the code is public domain, or if it was obvious to you as a professional software developer. What matters is that some functionality of your App overlaps with some over-broad and obvious-to-the-trained-practitioner yet still patented function where that patent is in the hands of a legal pirate crew willing to issue demand letters to you and all vendors through whom you distribute your App.
Especially Apps marketed through a famous and very public venue like the App Store. There you’ll have bands of royalty-pirates checking every App for possible reasons to use these spurious patent claims to extort from you.
Software patents cover broad concepts, not implementation details.
It's about independent developers making commercial software, not contract coders or consultants for custom apps. Those can usually side under the radar of patents. Commercial developers can't and that's what this is about.
You create software and here comes a patent troll, which produces nothing and only exists as a litigant, suing you in the Federal District of East Texas.
With Obama pushing the change from first to invent to first to file, and the ineptness of the patent office at weeding out the obvious from the non-obvious, the risk of falling afoul of a broad software patent is only going to get higher.
Thanks, good post!
I come across as bitter and grumpy? That’s not good.
No, not really. It was a stream-of-consciousness post.
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