We software guys complain about this all the time, but Excel completely permeates the corporate world because it:

- is universally available (who in an office building DOESN'T have an Office license?)

- can be "Programmable" to the extent that it needs to be. You don't have to start with code. Formulas and conditionals are great for most things. People usually ease into Macros gently.

- produces a format that is sharable. People "fork" Excel spreadsheets all the time. It's not pretty but it works.

- gets the job done. You want data entry with some calculations and maybe a few if-then rules here and there? What's better than Excel?

In a corporate environment, often the best way to get things done is to circumvent the official software and just write something that works. When we do it, we call it an elegant hack, but when guys in suits who went clubbing last night do it, we call it a terrible, amateur travesty that should be replaced by PROPER code as soon as possible.

And you know what, eventually that happens. Very rarely, an incredibly useful Excel spreadsheet will be replaced by an even more useful (and reliable) piece of custom software that also adds tons of value to both the users and the organization. But I've worked in corporate consulting for years; can you guess how often this happens? I'd wager it's less than 40%.

No, what typically happens is that an analyst or software dev notices someone's cool spreadsheet and says "hey, I can make something that does this job, but it'll be a LOT faster and I'll put the data up in the cloud and multiple people can access it at once and..."

And that sounds great, so they get a little budget and a project is born. Most of us who have been there and done that know what happens next: higher-level stakeholders get involved, broader objectives get defined, more team members are brought on, timetables are established, results are "metricized", paradigms are going to be shifted, etc.

Rarely does a piece of software escape from this process that is as genuinely useful as the spreadsheet which spawns it. Often, rather, it gets delivered 6 months late. It crashes all the time. What used to be one simple input field is now a whole page with checkboxes you have to check and sub-objects you have to define. The end result might look a little prettier but that cool Infragistics graph is locked inside the program and can't be shared like the old Excel report because no one hooked up the "export feature". People are getting upset. Everyone hates this program. But we have to use it, it's mandated by corporate.

Meanwhile, a talented new guy comes on the team and notices what a bloated piece of crap this software is. He wonders why no one has written a little Excel sheet to get around it and REALLY get some work done...

I know I'm being cynical. And look, I GET that rogue spreadsheets can turn into productivity-damaging unseen business risks. But until the corporate "software project" culture understands why it happens and why people are often far happier with their clunky spreadsheet than with your shiny WPF app or web page, I don't think this problem is going to go away.

Contact a lawyer immediately.

There are many actions you could take to mess with the investigation that might seem like fair game, but you should discuss each one with an attorney so you don't provide some arcane justification for them to arrest you (by hacking back, or even maybe "interfering with an investigation").

Once you get past that stage, the attorney can help you petition to stop the behavior or demand more information about it.

Legal advice is what you need now, not tech advice.

(Because the server is crushed, I'm only getting the basic gist - forgive me if you've already done this.)

"I’ll be wearing a black suit."

That should have been enough to make anyone suspicious.

So here's what I gather, after having read the lower court opinion and several of the briefs.

Monsanto owns a patent on certain soybean seeds. They sell 1G seeds to farmers, allowing the farmers to grow them into 2G seeds. The farmers are not licensed to plant the 2G seeds. Bowman bought some 2G seeds and planted them, and Monsanto sued.

Bowman says that the planting of 2G seeds is permitted under the doctrine of "patent exhaustion." According to that doctrine, if a patented physical object is sold under proper license, then a patent lawsuit involving that same physical object is not permitted, even if the object is sold to someone else.

The lower court said that patent exhaustion doesn't apply to the 2G seeds, because Monsanto only granted a license on the 1G seeds. The 1G seeds are not the same physical object as the 2G seeds.

At first I thought this was a simple case, but Bowman is making a very interesting argument in the Supreme Court. It is based on an old case called Quanta.

In Quanta, the patent was directed to a certain computer process, and the patent owner sold computer chips with circuitry for performing that process. The chips themselves were useless, of course, but they just needed to be combined with some standard hardware and turned on to work. Did this mean that, by adding the extra hardware, a new physical object had been made that could be the subject of a lawsuit? The Supreme Court said no: because the chips "embodied" the patented invention and only required standard hardware to be added, the chips invoked patent exhaustion, so lawsuits based on their further use were barred.

Bowman's argument: the 1G seeds "embody" the invention (by having the DNA and biological machinery to produce 2G seeds), and only "standard hardware" (soil, watering, etc.) needs to be added to get the working invention (the 2G seeds), so therefore the 2G seeds fall under patent exhaustion.

The main counterargument is that in Quanta, the original computer chips were still present and intact, whereas the 2G seeds do not include the 1G seeds intact. This requires a narrower interpretation of Quanta, and I could see the Supreme Court going with either this narrower reading or Bowman's broader one.

(For fun, you can try to come up with hypothetical cases that are in between: what if the patentee in Quanta had sold semiconductor masks for making chips?)

I don't know you and I don't know the world you live in, but just from your worried tone, and the rate at which you're responding to comments in this thread, I just want to say: take a breath. Engaging in a wild HN thread, full of well meaning but varied techy suggestions/speculation might not be the best approach right now. Have some friends sift through it for good information and disengage. Seek legal advice, and take it slow.

You're driving along a road and you notice a pothole. You pull over to the shoulder, put your hazards on, open up the trunk, take out a reflective vest and tape measure, then you begin to analyze the pothole. You spend an hour analyzing the depth and formation of the pothole and determine that the cause is due mostly to poor mixing of asphalt. You call the town hall and learn that the road construction crew uses a Caterpillar BG500E wheeled asphalt paver. After some extensive research you determine that poor mixing occurs from the inferior design of the BG500E's auger and that upgrading to the BG600D with its improved auger would cause better asphalt mixing and produce paved road conditions less conducive to potholes.

By now it's 9:30pm. It's dark and cold. You realize what your original purpose was: Dinner with friends. That was two hours ago. You missed dinner, but hey, you got some satisfaction.

The above was more of an analogy about Yak Shaving than Rabbit Hole Syndrome, but there are parallels. Like you, I used to be obsessive about details and solving subproblems. I used to come home from work and work on my own side projects for similar reasons as your own.

But then an advisor said something like, "You need to focus. If you want this thing of yours to succeed, you have to focus on making it succeed. Nothing else should matter." So I stopped my side projects and I became so effective at building our product that my employees wondered if I ever slept.

Stay on target. Make it to dinner.