Spolsky Discovers NPEs

I'm generally a fan of Spolsky's philosophies and discussions on software development and business practices, but his blog entry on "The Patent Protection Racket" isn't one of his best. As I've noted in the past, we appear to have created this NPE monster ourselves and it's not really anything new. Efforts to prevent bad patents from getting issued sound better to me, but it's probably also going to be necessary to encourage more small developers to band together to fight NPE abuses.