Z:gnu-www-ja-google-engineering-talk--add202-But the big danger comes from/en

But the big danger comes from patent law, because the US allows software ideas to be patented. Now, writing a non-trivial program means combining hundreds of different ideas. It's very hard to do that if any one of those ideas might be someone's monopoly. It makes software development like crossing a mine field, because at each design decision, probably nothing happens to you, but there's a certain chance that you will step on a patent and it will blow up your project. And, considering how many steps you have to take, that adds up into a serious problem. We have a long list of features that free software packages don't have, because we're scared to implement them.