Science & Tech Quote by Larry Wall

Wall’s phrasing is almost disarmingly mild, which is exactly the point. “I think” and “a bad idea” read like casual opinion, but coming from the creator of Perl and a longtime open-source voice, it’s a controlled understatement: a way to indict an entire legal regime without sounding like a crank. The sentence has the rhythm of a practical engineer, not an ideologue. That tonal choice matters because software patent debates are often drenched in abstraction (innovation! property!), and Wall drags it back to the shop floor: what actually gets patented, and what that does to people trying to build.

The real charge sits in “trivial inventions.” It’s not just that patents exist; it’s that the bar for novelty gets low enough to reward paperwork over problem-solving. “Trivial” is a moral adjective masquerading as a technical one. It implies waste, rent-seeking, and a system that mistakes obviousness for genius when it’s dressed in legal language. The subtext is that software, unlike many physical inventions, is compositional and iterative: progress comes from recombining known ideas quickly. Patents turn that normal recombination into a minefield where the most successful players aren’t necessarily the best programmers, but the best at stockpiling claims.

Contextually, Wall is speaking from a culture (open source) built on permissionless tinkering and shared primitives. His intent isn’t to romanticize “free software” as charity; it’s to protect the pace and texture of software creation. If the core building blocks can be owned in tiny, “trivial” increments, the future belongs to lawyers, not builders.