Ideological Resistance to Patents, Followed by Reluctant Pragmatism

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.