If you read Augmenting a user interface with information and Augmenting a user interface with additional information you’ll see that several of the concepts I worked on at Intel have been patented. I have mixed emotions. I am strongly and publicly against the concept of software patents. I don’t believe they’re useful for the advancement of the software industry; nor do they really give enough information to actually move forward the state of the art. However I can’t deny that I did feel a slight sense of satisfaction when I saw the letter. I’m proud of the work we all did on Moblin. We were explicitly trying to do things differently and better than they had been done before, in a way it’s nice to see that recognised. But I can’t look past the chilling effects that this has on my own practice, and that of my friends. I don’t want to live in a world where the only way I can experience software like the Visual Tab Switcher is in an incompetently voiced over video of some beta software.