Ideological Resistance to Patents, Followed by Reluctant Pragmatism

This article reflects on an ideological discomfort with software patents, a direct experience of patent aggression in the software industry, and the practical constraints faced by startups. It argues that while the patent system remains deeply flawed, defensive patenting can function as a shield in an asymmetric legal environment, especially for open-source innovators.

05 March 2026

Naresh Jain

Naresh Jain is the founder of Specmatic, Xnsio and ConfEngine, and an early pioneer of the Agile movement in India. He began his career building neural networks for ISRO and has spent over two decades partnering with leaders at unicorns and Fortune 500 companies to improve how they build and deliver high-quality software at scale. Naresh is known internationally for his pragmatic, people-centric approach to product engineering and technical excellence.

CONTENTS

Our reluctant journey to defensive patents The imperfect alternatives to patents

I have always been uncomfortable with patents. Ideologically, I subscribe to Richard Stallman's school of thought that ideas should move freely, innovation should compound in the open, and progress should not be fenced off by legal constructs. Over time, this led me to develop a strong discomfort with patents, and I genuinely believed they cause more harm than good.

Software patents are mostly used as roadblocks to innovation

That belief was no longer theoretical when I was confronted with a very real situation where patents were weaponized. I still remember working at Hike Messenger in 2016 and being pulled into the boardroom for an emergency meeting after we received a legal notice from a large messaging platform alleging IP violation.

Patents such as US10051104B2 and its published cousin US20130305164A1 describe delivery and read receipts for messaging apps. These are seemingly simple, intuitive UX elements, such as message delivery and read indicators. What surprised me was not the existence of such patents, but the realization that features users instinctively expect in an app were being held hostage by IP claims.

The industry had reached a point where even basic UX primitives could be turned into legal leverage, shaping who could innovate freely and who could not.

Martin Fowler clearly articulated these concerns in his post on software patents. He explains why software patents are fundamentally broken: too few of them have any true novelty, too many have vague and overly broad claims. Consequently, they have shifted from incentivizing invention to reinforcing existing power structures. Based on my experience, I agree with his diagnosis.

Our reluctant journey to defensive patents

What follows is not a rebuttal of that position, but an account of what it means to innovate inside that reality. When patents become weapons rather than signals of innovation, the question is not why the system is broken, but what startups are supposed to do inside it.

While building Specmatic, whose core is open sourced, we had to ensure we could protect our innovation. Reluctantly, we decided to file a couple of patents: not to monetize it, not to block others, but purely as defense, so that we would not be locked out of our own work again.

Filing a Patent Is an Unexpected Act of Clarity

Patent filing is not a feel-good exercise. You do not get to hide behind vision decks, buzzwords, piles of code, or vague claims of innovation. It forces uncomfortable questions: What is actually unique here? What problem are we solving that others have not? Where does prior art end and our idea begin? If everything else is stripped away, what is the irreducible core of our innovation?

Answering these took real effort. It forced discipline to precisely articulate ideas that previously existed only as architecture baked into the code of our product. In many ways, it felt less like legal paperwork and more like the most rigorous design review we had ever done, one conducted against the backdrop of the entire industry's history.

Prior Art Searches Are Humbling and Surprisingly Energizing

The prior art search was equally enlightening. Seeing how others had tackled similar problems, sometimes decades earlier, was humbling. It showed us where we were building on existing work, where the industry had stalled, and where there were genuinely unexplored areas ripe for innovation. In several cases, it sparked new ideas. In others, it helped us simplify what we were building.

Ironically, the process made our thinking more open, not more defensive.

I still believe the patent system is deeply flawed. That has not changed.

I Still Don't Like Patents, but I Understand Their Defensive Necessity

What has changed is my understanding of power asymmetry. Large players can treat patents as a tool to extract royalties and fend off competition, while startups often have no choice but to patent execution paths to protect their work from appropriation or exclusion. When legal leverage outweighs originality or execution, ideology alone does not protect you.

Used thoughtfully, patents can act as a shield, not a weapon. This insight is highly relevant for startups building foundational infrastructure in spaces dominated by large companies with better lawyers than engineers.

In many ways, the fact that startups like us feel compelled to file defensive patents proves Martin's argument. When a system is designed to reward legal capacity instead of novelty or technical merit, even those who believe deeply in openness are forced to engage with it, not out of conviction, but out of necessity.

The imperfect alternatives to patents

Before concluding that defensive patents were the only option, it is worth examining alternatives that aim to preserve openness without resorting to patenting.

Joining patent non-aggression communities like Open Invention Network (OIN) help encode intent and reduce harm. They help reduce patent risk within defined open-source ecosystems, particularly around the Linux System. They are valuable, but they do not eliminate the underlying asymmetry. They do not prevent third parties from patenting your ideas, nor do they guarantee protection if those patents are asserted outside the scope of the Linux System, where Specmatic falls outside core coverage. Builders still have to navigate a system where legal protection and legal capacity are unevenly distributed.

Open-source licenses are about copyright, they do not protect from patent attacks

No open-source license directly prevents patenting. Some licenses, such as Apache 2.0 and GPLv3, discourage patent aggression through explicit clauses, but other like MIT License, are intentionally silent on patents.

It is also important to understand that patent law and copyright law are separate systems:

• Open-source licenses operate under copyright. Copyright does not protect the underlying idea, concept, or method. Another developer can independently write different code with the same functionality without infringing copyright.
• Patents, in contrast, operate under patent law. Patent law protects methods, systems, and technical inventions. Patents allow the holder to exclude others from practicing that invention, regardless of the specific code they use.

Note: Specmatic's core is released under the MIT License. That choice was intentional. We wanted the core to be genuinely open, easy to adopt, and usable without friction, while still allowing us to build commercial products on top. MIT optimizes for reach and composability, not control. The trade-off is that MIT provides no structural protection against patent aggression. There is no patent retaliation clause and no implicit non-aggression pact. Openness maximizes adoption, but it does not neutralize power. Defensive measures therefore sit alongside permissive licensing, not in opposition to it.

Hold on to your ideals, but pair them with clear-eyed realism. If you are building something genuinely novel, particularly infrastructure, tooling, or platforms, leaving your innovation unprotected can make you vulnerable, sometimes even to the point of being excluded from the very work you created.

The system is imperfect. Holding on to principles is important, but I have learned that principles alone do not shield us from reality.

Acknowledgments

Gregor Hohpe, Julian Harty and Martin Fowler encouraged me to publish this article and gave thoughtful feedback. Hari Krishnan, Joel Rosario, Milee Jain and Charu Grover helped me author and file the patents. Sandeep Shetty, Ketan Padegaonkar, Sriram Narayan, John Sinclair and Yogesh Nikam helped me refine the article. OpenAI's Codex agent helped with the XML syntax and to refine sections of this article.

Significant Revisions