The Downfall of Imperative Programming

[Paulo Pinto]

On Thursday, 12 April 2012 at 13:36:41 UTC, Jeff Nowakowski wrote:
> On 04/10/2012 12:06 PM, Paulo Pinto wrote:
>>
>> A curious fact is that the FP fans have much to thank to 
>> Microsoft, as
>> it is the company with more FP research on their paychecks. 
>> Many open
>> source fans are not aware that a few of the main developers in 
>> the Ocaml
>> and Haskell communities, work for Microsoft Research labs.
>
> I don't see any reason to thank Microsoft for this so much as 
> to be wary of it. The same people that were getting paid to 
> work on this stuff at universities in Europe, where software 
> patents don't exist, are now getting paid to work at Microsoft, 
> where patenting software is expected as part of the job.
>
> Microsoft has also in recent years been very aggressive with 
> their patent portfolio, rattling their saber at Linux and suing 
> Android distributors.

And yet IBM still is the number one champion in patents.

Or just, because they play nice most of the time with open source 
they are excused?

Patents are bad, regardless which company makes use of them.