is anyone as discontent or disappointed with the software industry as i am these past few years? it’s as if software companies have given up on innovating and improving their products and have instead turned toward throwing huge sums of money at lawyers to sue their competitors into oblivion. the most visual instance of this as of late has been the sco wave of lawsuits against all unix vendors, novell, ibm, and others. i guess their next target is going to be the bsd vendors like apple and other open source distributions. if that isn’t the ideal example, how about at&t suing paypal and ebay for infringement of their “mediation of transactions” patent. their what? what the heck is an “apparatus for employing a communications system with actively connects communicating entities to mediate transactions”? if you submit a patent, the unwritten rule is to make it as obtuse and obfuscated as possible. this leaves you with a huge window that will facilitate the suing of anyone and everyone who remotely appears to infringe on your patent. we have truly entered the era of innovation via litigation.