Slashdot Mirror
Hitachi Folds, Rambus Keeps On Rolling
macsen writes " Yet another company gives into Chipzilla's memory mongers, and it doesn't bode well. Hitachi appears to be going for an upfront settlement, and an agreement to drop litigation between the company and Rambus. Two companies in less than a week, and the Third Law of Thermodynamics begins to take hold.
See what
Tom's Hardware has to say." Check out a more informational original link. This is most ungood - see the first folding, as done by Toshiba last week.
Again we have a company that makes Rambus products (and gets Rambus warrents for this) settling with Rambus. When a Rambus prevails over a company that does not make Rambus memory, I will start to worry bigtime. Till then I approach this one with suspicion.
For me, RAMBUS is yet another example in a long string of Things That Should Have Failed. Rambus didn't win on technical merits, nor did it win on a better price point, no - it won on the basis of a bad decision by Intel and some legal wrangling. AMD quietly adopted Rambus, and even went as far as to make it so their next generation CPU will not take anything but Rambus.
As a consumer and a citizen of this country, I find this to be a failure in the capitalistic system. What happened to "equilibrium price" and competition to keep it down? It seemingly was thrown out. I blame it on government inaction, but others might blame it on government action - as this was caused directly by government intervention, specifically, a time-limited monopoly called a "patent" which prevents people from developing and purchasing alternatives at a lower price.
I look forward to the computer industry's UniCorp - a single massive company that owns everything, and you "lease" the products it produces and are subject entirely to its own bylaws and contracts. Competitors? No way. And all the while, our government officials and social elite will maintain that this was "the will of the market". No, it wasn't.. this isn't capitalism, this is facism with a different name!
SDRAM and DDR-SDRAM aren't going away anytime soon despite whatever patents Rambus claims to own. Rambus have stated that the licence fees for RDRAM technology will be lower than for SDRAM/DDR-SDRAM. However, SDRAM and DDR-SDRAM will still be much cheaper for quite some time to come because the manufacturing cost of RDRAM will always be higher than for comparable SDRAM. This is the main reason why RIMMs are so much more expensive than DIMMs - not because of the licensing costs. See this EETimes story for more information.
As I have noted in earlier, more detailed posts, like this one, this agreement is simply a classic example of the 'patent sharing' (not always entirely voluntary) that is standard practice within the Japanese patent system. I'm not saying that it is entirely innocuous -- much of the Japanese system of doing business could be framed in terms that would provoke extreme outrage from much of the Western geek community (and indeed the business community). However, I *am* saying that it is not only part of 'business as usual' today, but has been an element of the electronics industry, back before the first cheap (and shoddy) Japanese transistor radios -- i.e. all our lives! It's not a disturbing new trend, if anything, it's milder than it once was.
Yes, Rambus isn't Japanese -- but look at its list of partners (recently divided up, regrettably into separate pages for each technology)
This system has several major goals: preserving hierarchy and the Japanese business structure (which is very different than ours, with strong, almost monopolistic vertical integration, pan-industry consortia, and many intermediate layers of supernumary distributors), 'maintaining relationships' in the Japanese sense, perhaps most importantly allowing Japanese industrial development in the face of foreign patents (in the early decades).
It is an expression of their culture, which retains very significant feudal elements. It would be disruptive and disrespectful to expect them to instantly adopt *our* values, as if we had some intrinsic superiority. If they even attempted this, to a greater degree than MITI already does, it could massively disrupt their economy and society (e.g. the supernumary distributors are a major part of the economy and cannot be eliminated easily; also, their approach to lifetime career and company affiliation could not be more alien to Silicon valley, where even founders like Steven Jobs leave, compete, return, etc.)
_________________
If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
I see allot of posts decrying the evils of Rambus and/or its parent companies.
This is silly. The companies are not evil for working within the framework of the law to protect their profits.
The patent system, on the other hand, is evil, if one defines evil to be that which is harmful to progress and the public good.
There are only so many ways to interface memory with data. There are only so many ways to synch memory timing. Each patent provides an entity with what, in terms of computing, amounts to an eternal monopoly. Eternal, because 20 years from the filing date is an eternity in terms of how fast the technology moves. Or, at least, has until now.
I do not think it will be long before every useful method for interfacing one computing component with another, be it memory, mass storage, or what have you, will be patented by someone. Probably several someones, quite likely with conflicting patent claims. What then? No competition, as each entity will have a government enforced monopoly in its domain, which it may cross license to a competitor in the same way Rambus does - at a higher price to make the competitor's (possibly more popular or superior) product less competetive.
Without competition there will be no incentive to innovate.
With less innovation technological progress will be slowed, quite possibly to a crawl.
Then, of course, the patent advocates will proclaim that 20 years from the date of filing is a perfectly reasonable amount of time for a patent, as the technology is still in use 20 years later.
Of course, they neglect to point out that the reason the technology is still in use 20 years later is because progress has been stifled for so long by the very system of patents they advocate.
There is a reason the planes we fly in have 50 year old designs, despite advances in materials and aeronotical sciences. (Only now are some experimental craft finally using comosites and making real progress again -- many of the patents have expired!) There is a reason we are all driving filthy petroleum burning cars despite having had the technology for clean hydrogen burning motors for over forty years. (The oil companies bought up the patents and buried them - only now are a few buses finally burning hydrogen fuel and filling the air with water vapor instead of carcinogens - the patents are expiring.) Now we will begin seeing this same, slow crawl of technology coming to the area of computer science as well - the patent mongers have discovered us, and are locking up all of our ideas.
These areas of research are all characerized by an initial explosion of new technology followed by glacial progress. Not because people are unimaginative, or because all the possiblities have been explored, all the discoveries made. No. It is because all of the fundamental ideas are locked away, privatized into someones property, and further research is thereby severely stifled. Now we have the agonizing displeasure of seeing it happen to our field of endeavor as well.
Patents are bad for software. That much is obvious to nearly everyone here. What is less obvious, and far more insidious, is that patents are bad for hardware as well. In fact, patents are bad for every realm of scientific and technological endeavor: they lock down ideas, lock people out possibilities they might otherwise have explored (and that might have otherwise led to even greater discoveries), they stifle innovation and yes, even economic incentive. One guy gets a monopoly and maybe even gets rich, two or three others with the same idea (and maybe even a better implementation of it) are locked out, and a hundred others are prevented from making their contribution at all.
How much science, how much progress, has been lost to this despicable system? How much better could our lives have been, if only our thoughts and ideas hadn't been treated like land claims in a bad western?
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy