Z:gnu-www-ja-stallman-mec-india--88861b-So what it says is: the harm t/en

So what it says is: the harm that the patent system would do is ten times the benefit, on the average. Now, for IBM though, this harm doesn't happen, because IBM does have 9000 patents and does force most of them to cross-license, and avoids the problem. But if you are small, then you can't avoid the problem that way, and you will really be facing ten times as much trouble as benefit. Anyway, this is why the big multinational corporations are in favor of software patents, and they are lobbying governments around the world to adopt software patents and saying naive things like &ldquo;this is a new kind of monopoly for software developers, it has to be good for them, right?&rdquo;