> Writings contemporary with that exact clause explicitly state its justification...
However, the clause wisely did not include any of that and just specified the intended ends ("progress...") and the means ("time-limited monopoly"). This has stood the test of time, as approaches that were not feasible before (e.g. the ease of reverse-engineering) meant secrecy was not an option and people sought other incentives to invest resources into innovative activity.
> A per-copy license fee of a penny kills FOSS completely; there is no "increased costs".
True, but just because it's FOSS does not mean it gets to free-ride on the fruits of somebody else's labor. If some people want to give away the fruits of your labor for free, more power to them, but that does not mean they get to demand others to do so as well.
> In all cases, I specifically noted the novelty of the software developed;
Well, leaving aside that things like WebRTC is entirely a re-implementation of pre-existing technology in a browser, I noted that much of the software was developed nonetheless. Any novelty developed could have been made available in many other non-infringing ways, such as publishing of papers or technical documents. I'd still say that counts as technical progress. Not being distributable as free software sounds more like a business problem to me.
> And in case it looks like I've only seen one side of the issue: ...
Ditto, besides working with patents, I've contributed to open source projects, open sourced a bunch of my own work and use open-source projects on a daily basis. I see waste and inefficiencies in both systems, but I also see what each has enabled and remain convinced that we need both systems.
> All innovation is follow-on innovation.
True, and this is why patent systems work by distinguishing claimed advances over the prior art before awarding a patent.
> "pay their fair dues" presupposes that ideas should have owners and monopolies who can extract dues;
Or it simply recognizes that ideas have value and people who come up with good ideas should be rewarded just as well as people who provide value in other means.
> The rate of innovation is far too fast for patents.
I have seen ideas introduced almost two decades ago get traction just now. The alternative viewpoint is that good ideas have value forever and 20 years is a fair amount of time to attempt to capture their value.
> "Ideas should not have owners, and inventors do not have an innate right to control ideas" is a defensible position, just one you disagree with.
My position is more that people should reap rewards proportional to what value they provide, and in my mind innovation is one of the biggest creators of value out there. As such Apple, the richest company in the world (and not one I particularly like) should have captured a much larger portion of the smartphone market. Unfortunately, we have no better means of capturing value other than treating things like property, and this has been extended to ideas. If there are better means shown to have worked for ideas, I'm all for them, but at this point, patents are it.
Writings contemporary with that exact clause explicitly state its justification as encouraging the publication of ideas that might otherwise be kept secret; the presumption is that without patents industry would keep more secrets. I think we have ample evidence today to doubt that, but hundreds of years ago that seems plausible.
> I'll note that often what was prevented was re-implementation of existing technologies available on the market, and nothing prevented the research and development of follow-on innovation, only its distribution to the market, which ostensibly would also have been allowed if a license was taken. Sure that would have increased costs of downstream applications
A per-copy license fee of a penny kills FOSS completely; there is no "increased costs". Software has little value if not distributed, and demanding any licensing cost has the same effect as a cease-and-desist, killing the project in either case.
In all cases, I specifically noted the novelty of the software developed; I left out the large stack of cases involving "just" reimplementation, as I figured you'd find them unmoving. For a more extensive (though by no means incomplete) list, see https://www.gnu.org/patent-examp/patent-examples.html .
I grew up through the libgif/libungif debacle, through MP3 being unavailable, through FFMPEG and LAME practically being contraband, through Debian having a "non-us" archive (ostensibly for crypto due to ITAR, but in practice also for patents). I see patents as a minefield, with the known mines marked by the projects hurt by them. I see patents stopping software development on a regular basis.
And in case it looks like I've only seen one side of the issue: I've also successfully filed a dozen patents (all of which have Free Software implementations released), dealt with corporate patent licensing and contract negotiation, and seen various other patent-related workings inside companies. I stand by my conclusion that patents do more harm than good.
> why should products not pay their fair dues to the upstream innovations that made them possible
All innovation is follow-on innovation. Everything builds on previous things. "pay their fair dues" presupposes that ideas should have owners and monopolies who can extract dues; I don't consider that "fair" at all.
The problem becomes even worse in the case of "out of nowhere" patents; you can hardly call them "upstream innovations" if the author of the software didn't even know about the patent, let alone read it and build on it.
The rate of innovation is far too fast for patents. One of the many short-term reforms that would help curb the damage would be a drastically reduced duration; 20 years represents many generations of technology, and a company or companies dedicated to excluding others can stretch that out indefinitely with a steady series of patents (and vague threats and FUD, which work almost as well).
> Both of them were operating companies whose technology was ripped off by Microsoft.
Microsoft wrote their own implementations of both technologies (or in the case of DoubleSpace, obtained it from a different company). DoubleSpace was not a copy of Stacker, and Word was not a copy of whatever i4i supposedly made when they weren't suing people. The term "ripped off" presupposes ownership of ideas and agreement with the patent system. I don't think it would be reasonable for one company to control the entire concept of disk compression from 1990-2010. I don't believe Microsoft did anything wrong in either case.
> So this was not a strawman after all
It was: you held up an argument I never made that had obvious incorrect statements in it to make it sound ridiculous. "The Wright Brothers and Apple did not innovate" is a ridiculous notion. "Ideas should not have owners, and inventors do not have an innate right to control ideas" is a defensible position, just one you disagree with.
> They certainly did well enough, but not nearly as well as they should have.
Apple, the biggest company in the world, didn't do nearly as well as they should have? They've been wildly successful, due in no small part to the exact innovations you're talking about. (And I doubt that success would have been appreciably smaller without patents.)