From our experience, it's entirely possible that all the revenue for a product can be eaten up by legal fees. After years of pouring your heart and soul into that product, it's devastating. It makes you question why the hell you're in the business: when you can't pay salaries from product sales, there's no point in building it in the first place.

Needless to say that software patents need to be killed. They create a system where only two kinds of companies can feel safe from devastating legal issues: huge corporations that have incredibly deep patent portfolios, and patent trolls. Marco Arment notes:

The best thing to happen to software-patent-disliking geeks might be for Google to get their ass kicked a bit by patent litigation so theyâ€™re motivated to challenge the patent system more seriously than any of us ever could.

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But wait, there's more!

Want to read more like this? Buy my book's second edition! Designed for Use: Create Usable Interfaces for Applications and the Web is now available DRM-free directly from The Pragmatic Programmers. Or you can get it on Amazon, where it's also available in Chinese and Japanese.

The Rise and Fall of the Independent Developer