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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."
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
Hmm. Limitless income source? I guess it depends.
Do I have to feed 3 infants to rabid pit bulls every week, to collect?
Do I have to lock old people up in a dungeon, and feed them moldy dog chow to collect?
Does it require poisoning the water table of a major region or continent?
Or running for political office?
Selling my soul to satan?
Actually, there are even more, but you must see my point by now... there are any number of things that I consider either too tasteless or unethical to want to make money off ot them. And I think raping the entire world, and its first true global network, just so they can own a piece of its soul for all eternity, fits in nicely with the above examples.
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
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.
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.