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Almost Every Company Is A Software Company
Date : 03 07 2008 Category : Business
Techdirt
I noted last summer that the New York Times launched a new blog called Open about the use of open source technoogies at the paper. On Tuesday the blog had a post about a new Perl profiler that they developed in-house and are releasing to the world. I'm not in the market for a Perl profiler, but I thought it was striking that the New York Times, a firm that a decade ago was totally clueless about the web, is now producing non-trivial free software projects. What I think this illustrates is that the common conception that software is something that comes in a box you buy at Best Buy is rather misguided. An enormous number of programmers are employed in organizations we don't think of as software firms, developing custom applications for the internal use of their employers. In a sense, every company of non-trivial size is a software company.
In fact, I'm composing this post in a custom CMS developed specifically for the Techdirt Insight Community. And this, I think, is one of the things that makes software patents so dangerous. A firm doesn't have to worry that its fleet of company cars infringe patents; that's generally the responsibility of the car manufacturers. In a healthy patent system, companies should only have to worry about patents in their own line of business. But when a company "manufactures" a software product for internal use, they suddenly have to worry about whether their internal software might be violating some patents. Indeed, the End Software Patents project has pointed out that companies as diverse as the Green Bay Packers, Kraft Foods, and Ford Motors have been hit by software patent lawsuits in recent years. The reality is that software isn't just an industry, it's becoming a fundamental tool for manipulating information about the world. Policies that implicitly assume that only a few companies in Silicon Valley and Seattle are "software companies" are going to cause major problems.
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In fact, I'm composing this post in a custom CMS developed specifically for the Techdirt Insight Community. And this, I think, is one of the things that makes software patents so dangerous. A firm doesn't have to worry that its fleet of company cars infringe patents; that's generally the responsibility of the car manufacturers. In a healthy patent system, companies should only have to worry about patents in their own line of business. But when a company "manufactures" a software product for internal use, they suddenly have to worry about whether their internal software might be violating some patents. Indeed, the End Software Patents project has pointed out that companies as diverse as the Green Bay Packers, Kraft Foods, and Ford Motors have been hit by software patent lawsuits in recent years. The reality is that software isn't just an industry, it's becoming a fundamental tool for manipulating information about the world. Policies that implicitly assume that only a few companies in Silicon Valley and Seattle are "software companies" are going to cause major problems.
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