Steve Jin (a great guy, who develops and runs the VI Java project, without which the vSphere API would have beaten me down more than once) has a great perspective on patentability of software architectures over on doublecloud. While I agree with his point about patent law, the main reason I point this post out is the value he places in "obvious" architecture being the right architecture.
This falls in line with my thoughts about building systems with an eye toward the future, but a focus on the present. We, as an industry, need to stop over-engineering things. Focus your time on achieving the system requirements, and just get it built already.
To me, if you want to patent something, make it a feature! Isn't that the real value we provide to customers? Sure, coming up with a scalable, robust, performant and extendable design is hard work. But the design constraints dictated by the features we want to build now (and in the future) should absolutely lead to obvious approaches to building the system.
Now this sentiment doesn't necessarily match every situation, but VERY few software projects warrant a non-obvious answer. In fact, if it's non-obvious, then that should really be due to the FEATURE being novel. Patent that.
If your high level architecture meets the patent law rule of being non-obvious, you're doin' it wrong.
