Posts Tagged: "software development"

The key idea is to think strategically about the software, the value it can provide to the company, and whether the technology should be developed in-house. In some cases, software can provide more value to the company when it includes open source components. Here at Dropbox, for example, we use open source software in our products and we use it to help with development… Even here there are a few ground rules: We evaluate the code on the way in so we know what has been incorporated in our software later. And we prohibit code that is licensed under more restrictive terms that could require us to open source our product in turn.

The first mover storyline also provides a false narrative because it is flat wrong from the customer perspective as well. Simply stated, the first mover myth ignores the very real concerns facing customers in the marketplace for expensive enterprise solutions. An innovative solution provider with a complicated enterprise software product must show an established and growing customer base or big money behind them, or more likely both, in order to pass the first step of a sales process, which itself can take a year or more. Then there may be large upfront costs until the system is integrated and running before it becomes profitable. This all means an enterprise software startup must have substantial funding if they are to have any chance to succeed. This, of course, requires strong patent rights.

Over the last decade, there has been a movement among the software developer community to employ some form of “agile development” rather than the traditional software development methodology. The belief is that these agile methodologies lead to higher quality software and faster development cycles. More recently, the implementation of agile software development has transitioned not only from small startups to large companies, but also from enterprises developing noncritical, consumer apps to those developing software for medical, aviation, military, and financial systems, where the presence of errors pose high human or economic risk. With these transitions, intellectual property (IP) law practitioners must adopt their traditional lawyering approaches to capturing and securing IP (especially patent) rights. A failure to recognize and adapt to the agile software development environment will result in a failure of IP law practitioners’ essential job function—helping to create or sustain client profitability and enable long-term business growth.