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the exact benefits to be derived are in doubt. Cookbook approaches
to software development preclude any finding of a discovery of
information that is technological in nature, or a process of
experimentation. Cookbook approaches to software development do
not result in new knowledge about the principles of computer
science or technical uncertainty that requires the consideration of
alternative hypotheses. In our opinion, Congress did not intend
cookbook approaches to software development to come within the
bounds of section 41 when it excluded from the R&E credit the
duplication of existing business components, or routine data
collection or testing. See sec. 41(d)(4)(B), (D)(iv) and (v); H.
Rept. 99-426, at 182 (1985), 1986-3 C.B. (Vol. 2) 1, 182; cf.
63(...continued)
Anybody engaged in, well, almost any
profession -- but let me make it in the
engineering profession for the moment --
accumulates a body of skilled practice over
time. These are things that you know how to
do because you're in the business.
Some of those things are difficult to
do. Some of them require a substantial
amount of skilled practice to do them. So to
say something is not research, or even to
call it routine software construction is no
way to denigrate it or to say it doesn't take
a substantial body of skill to do.
What it says is that, in the community
of people who do this kind of thing, the
knowledge of how to do it is out there, as
opposed to it has to be discovered or
revealed in some fashion. Okay? It's what
you would expect a competent professional in
the field to know and be to [sic] able to do.
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