Ian Lynch
CEO of IRL

Contrary to popular belief, software patents kill the incentive for entrepreneurs to innovate. IRL Computer Systems Ltd is a small family business. We can not afford to fight patent law suits and even applying for a patent is expensive for a small developing business. If we produce an application, whether closed or open source, we are at much lower risk without patents than with them. Software has been developed quite nicely in the UK education market to this point without software patents. The most obvious case against patents is exemplified by the court case of the UK Government vs Frontline Technology over a patent for student registration. This has cost the tax payer millions, not just in the court case to over turn the patent but also the inflated prices for a simple application where the patent was aggressively defended. Given that the development cost of this application is in the low 10s of thousands, this makes no economic sense whatsoever. The schools and local authorities could not as individuals afford to challenge the patent when they could have commissioned the software to be written from scratch at about the same cost as one license. This type of thing will become much more common because the patent offices simply are not competent to judge what is and is not a genuine innovation.