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Web Services Patented by IBM and Microsoft
daecabhir writes "This article from ZDNet is an interesting read. Not just because of the implications of what IBM and Microsoft appear to be doing, but because it again brings to light how susceptible many standards processes continue to be to commercial interests. You would think that being early adopters, crafting the standards so that they can have the first and most compliant implementations might be enough - but I guess these companies aren't secure about the quality of their products, so they have to go down the route of intellectual property ownership, enforcement and RAND (reasonable and non-discriminatory, whatever "reasonable" means) licensing fees."
I guess these companies aren't secure about the quality of their products...
That's a bit harsh. They're not doing this instead of making products. In fact, as I understand the article, their products have to be successful for this to work.
If you were in business and you spotted a potentially limitless income source in addition to your present core business, wouldn't you leap at it, regardless of how certain you were of your product?
Of course, this is the thing about corporations: there's no "income cap" like there's a karma cap, so there's always an incentive to go on pursuing more and more money by any legal (well, normally) means. I'm not advocating Communism, just observing that the businesses we consider most successful have generally got there not only thanks to good products but also a certain rapacity.
If they do decide to try to get royalties, they will find out that a lot of people are jumping to other technologies.
I am about to start a new contract for a bank, and I'll be involved in deciding what technologies will be used for new online application.
I am sure that SOAP/WSDL will not be considered, until we're sure what the real story is.
If someone decides that everyone has to stop using SSH, we'd have temporary solution tomorrow, and a permanent one few weeks/months ago.
The same will happen with this.
I feel the direction we should take as a community is to develope global software solutions for the masses by the masses. This ensures the scalability, reliablity, and useability of the software. As well we should focus our attentions to creating internet protocols that ensure the integrity of data and the near perfect delivery of data and content. If I were an english major or a marketing genius I could fit more buzz words in here.
The bottom line is corporations will make every attempt no matter how pro-this or pro-that (IBM using Linux and OSD) or the usefullness (M$ stealing OS code from OSD for Winblows) to gobble financial assests. The best part is once a company reaches a certain level of capitol its all numbers.
If M$ wants to charge its only out of fear of admitting that free works better than not free in a lot of cases. Charging seems absurd to us because we are used to being able to use free a lot. We use free now. And that is free as in free beer.
Everyday we use things that are FORCED upon us that are not free as in free beer and not free as in freedom of choice, change, and modification. Telephones, electricity, ambulances, hospitals, public and mass transit, CD-R's, RIAA, MPAA, and so on.
Screw it. I'm preaching to the choir on this aren't I?
Later,
Rivendahl
... there is nothing that has not already been thought
What a piece of garbage - does ANYONE seriously believe that a piece of "technology" such as SOAP would have a royalty placed on it?
Both MS and IBM are bright enough to realise that it isnt THAT good and that if they attempted such a move whichever protocol in question would just be swapped out for some other propriety protocol without the licensing fees. The high costs of commercial ORBs have been enough to keep CORBA away from being a widly used technology for years, any form of additional licensing on any protocol/standard will have exactly the same effect.
Puh-lease!!
On the other hand, we have all seen how competent our governments have been when confronted with technological issues and campaign contributions...
Why is Grand Theft Auto a much more serious crime than Reckless Driving?
It's not about being confident in your product. It's about investing loads of money into R&D before you produce a product.
Look at any other market where a company needs to do a LOT of R&D to produce a product. Pharmaceutical companies have to invest millions and millions to come up with a new drug to cure whatever. If someone else could immediately produce a generic alternative it wouldn't make sense for the company to do R&D in the first place. Why let someone else profit off their hard work and research?
Any time a company needs to do a lot of R&D to come up with a product it makes sense to seek intellectual property protection (patents, copyright, whatever). Otherwise they're just throwing away money on research - it has nothing to do with confidence in their product(s).
It sounds to me like the author of this article expects Microsoft and IBM to pull a trick like Unisys pulled a few years ago.
(For those who don't know, Unisys owned the patent for LZW, the compression algorithm used in GIF files. GIF was the standard Compuserve graphics format, and became the de-facto standard for the web, too. Once it became popular, Unisys began to ask for royalties for software that used LZW. It was at that point that the online pr0n industry moved to JPG files instead of GIF).
I don't know what kinds of rights MS and IBM retain on these standards, so I don't know what kinds of royalties they would ask for (would it be per program, per software license, or per copy of the standard, etc), but I would hope that the industry would have learned from their mistakes in the past with using proprietary technologies.
The 'net as we KNEW it has moved over to [secret] and to InterNet2.
The military has its own ultra-secure network that's NOT connected.
Academe has its own ultra-high-performance network that's NOT connected.
Face it, the originators of the internet, the military and academe no longer have any interest, need or say in what's happening.
The 'net that we're using now is a floundering piece of commercialized, lowest-common-denominator drivel that's going to descend into a pay-per-packet, metered, toll-gated rabbit warren of compromised hardware, lowest bidder SLAs (service level agreements) and cracked-all-to-Hell software and protocols.
But it'll be just good enough for the business who'll use it (because they have no other choice.)
And it'll be brought to you by people who didn't want it, didn't believe in it, and only see it as a way to make a buck now that all this silly inventiveness is over and the boring business of business can resume.
And you? Bwahahaha. Like they give a fuck. Pay and shut up.
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