There are alternatives to patents - for example hosting research intensive parts of your system in the cloud.
This is pretty much what is happening with speech recognition these days among other things.
No need to worry about opensource, or the fragility of patents, when you keep your technology a secret.
Another approach is to use trade secrets - you encrypt parts of your application - reducing performance - enabling you to sue anyone who decompiles it in order to replicate, or indeed interface with it.
Patents would actually seem the least of these evils, if they were only less broken.
This is pretty much what is happening with speech recognition these days among other things.
No need to worry about opensource, or the fragility of patents, when you keep your technology a secret.
Another approach is to use trade secrets - you encrypt parts of your application - reducing performance - enabling you to sue anyone who decompiles it in order to replicate, or indeed interface with it.
Patents would actually seem the least of these evils, if they were only less broken.