Discussion

These extended software life cycles already raise many fundamental questions that are not easy to answer:

• Is it possible to use these extended software life cycles in such a way that they comply with the major patenting systems world wide?
• How can the software engineering knowledge that is hidden in the patent data bases made accessible for software engineers?
• Is it possible to a give an operational definition of a patent infringement that can be used by software engineers?
• For each of the phases of the software life cycle (requirements engineering, design, implementation, testing and maintenance) the following questions should be answered:
  • How is knowledge in this phase represented?
  • Where can prior art for this phase be found?
  • How can patent infringements in this phase be identified?
  • How can patent infringements in this phase be resolved?
  We expect that the answers to these questions will widely differ for each phase.
• What are the technical implications for software development when using these extended software life cycles?
• What are the economic implications of the extended software life cycles?

We will come back to these questions in the remainder of this paper and in Section 8.10 we will propose a research agenda.

We will now relate the high-level discussion in the previous sections to the daily practice of software patents by studying several examples.