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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.
Wouldn't it be fairly easy to demonstrate in court that people were implementing web services long before IBM or Microsoft patented it?
I certainly think it looks like it.
Well, I guess it pretty much had to happen. These companies are a bunch of shameless freeloaders who are trying to turn a big profit from the open infrastructure of the Internet. And when they don't get their way with patent licensing, because W3C realizes that RAND licensing is not going to move technology forward, it is not surprising that they abuse their power to do a fork.
We've got to be on the alert on this. I think the best we can do is to make sure that we make good and extensive implementations if W3C standards, also for commerce applications.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
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
I think we need to think like IBM or Microsoft for a second. If I were an excutive at one of these companies I would patent technology I spent a millions to develop to make money to cover the cost of developing it. That is what a patent is for. Besides given IBMs track record lately they could use there patents to screw Microsoft. For instance they could say that anything that is open source doesn't have to pay a royalty and anything close source does.
In fact IBM having patents for web services insures competition. Microsoft can't afford to do anything stupid with the lisence (think samba xp thing) now that they don't have pieces to the puzzle patented, and they need web services in the future to servive.
The harder they try to control it, the more people will resist. The more powerful, aggressive, and merciless these corps get, the more of a reaction there will be against them. Not content to actually provide VALUE in order to make money, to provide services or goods that actually benefit anybody, they would prefer to worm their way to the heart of the Web and set up their corporate IP borders in a realm that should be run more like Antarctica than a gold rush.
So what do you call it when something that used to belong to everybody is appropriated by a self-interested party? Vandalism? Theft? Annexation? No matter how you look at it, this is an act of war: using IP law as a weapon against the common good. Maybe stuff like this will eventually change people's minds about the value of patents, copyrights, and trademarks. I can only hope.
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
regrouping and clamping down.
M$ is well known in its rapacity and IBM was deservedly the subject of the longest antitrust suit of the last century/millenium. Both have been money mills for lawyers on both sides of the issue.
All traffic will have to go through their gates (no pun intended,) and they will collect a tithe on every packet.
Look for rapid adoption of IPv6 after that since they will need to identify the source, route and destination of every packet in order to charge you for every hop.
Shades of Canada's x.25 packet network which use to cost me plenty every month.
The costs will realign themselves to make it impossible to for individuals to contemplate downloading squat since the cost of transmission will equal or exceed the cost purchase of a hard good.
Only businesses will be able to use the net and the size of those businesses will scale with the cost per packet. Eventually, only the rich and large corporations will be on the net and by then it won't be worth using.
If there is anything that the last series of wars has shown its that armies and money aren't power, control of communications is power.
And the powerful don't share with the powerless (that means YOU) regardless of the potential benefits for anyone involved.
Instead they hoard communications, distort and prevaricate and depending on the armaments available send out the bombers, the local equivalent of the "Ton Ton Macoute" or their own children, the ones who who haven't yet starved to death, out amongst the crowd wearing bombs strapped to their chests.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
... that's how the Internet came to flourish, and that's the only way future network technologies will ever have a chance. Anything else is quite simply doomed.
The existence of open standards such as TCP/IP, HTTP and all the rest, which were agreed upon by the major players, created markets in which everyone had their chance to create the best products. We've seen in recent years how hard it is to make money in the Internet, since users are accustomed to getting everything for free. If it had cost money just to use the thing in the first place, it never would have gotten off the ground.
If standards for web services are not royalty-free, then there will be no such thing within a few years. Or perhaps the idea of web services will survive on the basis of other, royalty-free protocols, but SOAP and WDSL and other patented technologies will be a footnote in history. Let IBM and M$ go ahead if they want to kill off their own inventions, it really doesn't bother me a bit.
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
This seems rather foul and underhanded. People are already committed to using SOAP and WSDL. *Now* Microsoft and IBM announce that this (and attaching techs) aren't royalty free, well, that smacks too much of "Here, kid, your first two hits are free."
If MS and IBM decide to enforce RAND, a lot of businesses are gonna just smile and take it you-know-where. I thought the W3C only proposed royalty free standards?
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!!
Only businesses will be able to use the net and the size of those businesses will scale with the cost per packet. Eventually, only the rich and large corporations will be on the net and by then it won't be worth using.
I very much doubt the net will die like this. Why would MS throw away a limitless revenue stream to move into a specialist market? Never mind the fact that it's opposed to their vision of "any time, any place and on any device," a business model that involved pushing people off the net would diminish the value of the service over time! More likely, I'd have thought, they'd make the cost of data transfer low enough that people couldn't be bothered to complain or work around it, and clean up on the quiet as the net continues to grow. Charge a penny per gigabyte, and watch the pile of pennies grow exponentially...
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?
The IEEE Standards Association, home to the 802 family (Ethernet, Wi-Fi, etc.) and legions of others, has a more enlightened IP policy, IMHO, as described in their bylaws and operations manual. From the bylaws:
This seems to provide a good compromise; patented technology may get into a standard, but only after disclosure and subsequent approval of the standard by the organization. In addition, while I can't speak for the IEEE-SA as a whole, 802 voters vote as individuals--there are no "corporate votes." Individual consultants have the same voting power as a corporate VP: While the VP may spend corporate $$ to have a collection of subordinates attend enough meetings to become eligible voters, members of the EFF, or any other collection of people, could also attend and vote. While the 802 process isn't perfect, and abuses have been known to occur, this aspect of the IEEE standards process also works to get the best technical standard produced.
"Against the backdrop of the W3C's emerging plan to adopt a primarily royalty-free-based patent policy, the royalty-free vs. RAND controversy reached full boil last October when Hewlett-Packard withdrew its support as a sponsor of IBM and Microsoft's W3C WSDL submission on the basis that WSDL might not be royalty-free"
It seems to me that HP supports open standards more than IBM does. And besides, IBM has historically been just as monopolistic as MS ever was. Also, HP & Compaq seem so support Linux as much as IBM does. I'm sure there is a good reason why people here admire IBM but think HPaq is doomed. I'd love to have someone explain it to me.
As far as WSDL is concerned, have you ever seen it? It's the most confusing, ill-designed, vague document on the planet. Many people have mentioned that XMI (XML Metadata Interchange) is far more suited to description of software objects, and would be far better for publishing/discovering web services. It's the format for UML, after all. It's here.
As far as SOAP extensions are concerned, any programmer that has needed to distribute software knows that you should always adhere to the core standards when designing your application. The use of any extension, or any veering too far to the left or right, will make your application unportable.
So let them have their members-only club, with a membership of 2.
If you can prove being the key phrase here. The problem with a little guy defending his patent against MegaCorp Inc. is that MegaCorp Inc. has a battalion of lawyers with nothing better to do than to bury the case in paperwork thereby outspending the little guy until he has to quit before winning his case.
See this page at Don Lancaster's site for more information.
To the people who are saying that if it turns out that these technologies are patented, we'll simply come up with an alternative: the problem isn't in the implementation of the technology (i.e., what's been sent to the W3C) the problem is that a patent covers the idea behind the technology and any attempt to implement the idea will also likely violate the patent.
I think one of the root causes of these situations is that the USPTO is issuing patents for ideas that are not truly innovative but which are pretty obvious to any programmer trying to solve that particular problem.
SOAP really does not do anything that is not provided by nice simple been around for a long time xml-rpc. We should ask google to quit using SOAP and pick up a xml-rpc interface to their search engine now. Personally I will never use SOAP due to it's bloated implementation and the fact that it's design was soley driven by MS with no reguard to the community.
Got Code?
If this artcile doesn't show you why you should avoid Microsoft technologies for application development I don't know what would. Microsoft has a long history of the "Embrace and Extend" tactics.
.Net, etc.) they will all of a sudden come up with a "new standard."
Microsoft is positioning the pieces right now and a lot of people are taking the bait. Once there is an established user base using these technologies (WSDL,
I am all for corporations making a profit from their software, but trying to set yourself up for a "tollbooth" at the expense of everyone who embraces the "standards" you contribute to the public, well, that just plain sucks.
--Jon
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).
A friend made an intersting point about patents the other day: "Imagine where we would be now if people had patented buble sorts etc."
One of the things that I find horrific about slashdot and it's readers attitude towards software patents is that idea that this is some how a new practice, and in 'the good old days' nobody patented software.
Well, to coin a phrase, that is BULLSHIT.
SOFTWARE PATENTS GO BACK TO THE EARLY DAYS OF THE COMPUTER INDUSTRY AND HAVEN'T SEEMED TO HAVE CAUSED ANY LONG-TERM HARM.
Patents exist of old concepts like the UNIX SUID bit, various types of regular expression implementations, the use of XOR in bitmaps for XWindows and any number of similar things.
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.
HP, IBM, Compaq, Sun, Microsoft, Oracle you name it, have one bottomline that they look to satisfy: profits.
If supporting open standards helps them get there, then that's what they will support. If it's not, then guess where they will go? Note that the profits may not be generated immediately. For example, they might support a particular initiative and even give away their code to either build goodwill or kill a competitor. But that too, is ultimately for one goal: to maximize profits.
Don't fool yourself into believing otherwise. Companies exist to maximize profits for shareholders. (Of course there are always the ones with the crazy CEOs like Larry Ellison who decide to fuck a company over just because they had the audacity to wean employees away from Oracle).
So any time you hear a company supporting an open standard you know one of the below is true:
o They don't have a dominant position in the area and want to fight the company that does.
o They have a dominant position in the area but don't see a revenue stream and see a better revenue stream coming from the goodwill.
Mmmm.. Donuts
Could someone post a list of the patents IBM and Microsoft hold in regard to Web Services? I think it's time to find out what those patents are and start a new trully open and royalty-free standards race. Off the top of my head I can imagine (and bring to fruition within 6 months) several alternate ways to do what Web Services try to do today, and this time do it right (come on, WSDL is COMPLEX, and where are the standard security messures?). So, post here links to those patents, and let's teach the big guys a lesson.
The second possibility is that somoene look at all these patents and make improvements to them or challenge them and invalidate them. In makeing improvements to them they would have to be non obvious and not impleied. In the case that you invalidate them just come up with proior art.
I cant spell.. will slashdot include a spellchecker if I pay for the service???
Only 'flamers' flame!
All you losers in the US ... I can only pity you. As long as such foolish patents are not recognized in more developed parts of the world, someone is relatively safe(r).
--> Your Wisecrack Here
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.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
lwn.net has a great tidbit on the fallacious conotation of this RAND term, vis-a-vis a complaint to the LWN editors from Richard Stallman:
[Quote LWN.net below. This is in the frontpage at the moment, it'll scroll off eventually, and wont be there for posterity. I can't find a better URL for it, however the date on the frontpage is 2002/04/11, in the future you might find it through that.]
BTW, I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere else, but the complete Stallman biography book, over at O'Reilly, is now available gratis, online!
The big companies are starting to play hardball, attempting to force RAND "standards" on us. Perhaps it's time we started playing hardball too. A large percenatage of core internet software is open source. What would happen if the default install of open source software started DROPPING any packets for RAND encumbered "standards"? A dead standard, that's what.
Note that I said "default install" would drop packets. Any software with this feature should have a simple option to disable this.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Microsoft is at it again, this time big-blue is right along with them. IBM and Microsoft are trying to erect so-called standard-bodies that would allow them to get-around the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) requirements for standards to be royalty-free.
Read this article over at ZDNet to get an overview of what is going on.
While they did release the core SOAP and UDDI specifications to the royalty-free process, they are trying to create "piggy-back" protocls that will ensue royalties (i.e. security signing of SOAP messages, file attachments on soap messages and security policy negotiations). They are trying to establish these standards through the UDDI and WS-I organizations. These organizations are perceived to be open and acceptable standard bodies, but they are not. They are heavily controlled by both juggernauts and conform to their interests.
The W3C and the IETF are the only true standard bodies of the Internet! Do not be fooled by IBM and Microsoft and do not be sucked into their grip!
They are trying to ensure that Open-Source, Free implementations of these standards will not be possible! They will be trying to become "toll-boothes" on the Internet.