I can completely understand the problems that surround patents but I would say that SparkFun doesn’t have a commercial product that people use. All their products are designed with the intention of building one widget. Not for mass produced products. That’s where patents are extremely important. For example Microsoft get’s licensing fee’s from every android phone made. I can’t imagine what it would look like if Windows wasn’t patented. Or if World of Warcraft wasn’t patented.
I agree that having a patent when the cost of getting that patent would cost more than the revenue the product generates and is worth. But when the revenue and the product is worth way more than the cost of getting a patent then you definitely need one.
I agree that 30 million is a large number, but when you talk to Apple, Google, Microsoft and a bunch of other publicly traded companies. Thirty million is a drop in the bucket. They make that in hours.
I liked the iPhone clone that you had Nate in your talk, but I can assure you that that phone would never show up on a major phone network store. If it did apple would raise hell because they have patents protecting it.
Good talk though Nate. Grats.