Blackberry Blackout Threat to Software as Service?

TheIndifferentiate writes "In light of how CEOs are reacting to a possible court injunction which could shutdown their RIM BlackBerry service, what impact do you think this will have on the 'Software as a Service' business model? The conventional wisdom in some commercial software corners has it that the threat of patent litigation should stop Open Source Software development in its tracks. If my business depends on an OSS application, and it gets shut down, I can potentially go on about my business as I have the executables and wouldn't have to stop using them until someone came knocking at my door. If an SaaS application gets shut down and my business depends on it, I'm dead in the water. Seems like one of the prime arguments against OSS also takes out SaaS too. Rhetorically speaking, how could a commercial ISV in good faith talk any business out of an OSS application and into an SaaS application?"

Comments

Making Your Bed

[Billosaur]

RIM created this problem by not having the foresight when the whole thing with NTP first surfaced, to create a contingency system which avoided the systems in question. Lack of vision now threatens to destroy everything they've built up, if they're fix to this problem is not easy for Blackberry users to implement and use.

That said, no one can truly anticipate where the attack is going to come from, but in developing a service you have to be prepared for anything to occur which may alter your service's operation. This doesn't mean just Business Continuity Planning for Katrina- and 9/11-type disasters, but the possibility of patent fights, industrial espionage, and just plain stupidity. It may add to lead times and slow production and upgrades, but more time spent up front will save a lot of time on the back end.

Re:Nothing I'd like better

[hawkbug]

I've thought about this, and it won't work using webmail. Here's why:

1) For starters, it's more than email. It syncs Outlook contacts and calendar items, but yes - I know there are plenty of PDA/phone alternatives for those functions - but it's nice they sync wirelessly. If you make a change in Outlook, it syncs through the air. Very cool.

2) You said Webmail, which is nice when you turn it on and login to check yourself. The BB is nice because you don't have to check, it checks for you. It shows a message icon when you get a new one. It can also ring, vibrate, or light up when you get a new message. No webmail app is going to do that for you.

3) You can then email people just like you can with Outlook directly from your Address book / contacts, which I already mentioned sync wirelessly.

If somebody can come up with a good alternative to BB, let me know - I'm all ears.

Re:Another reason why patents are bad

[JohnQPublic]

All it took was one little patent holding company to bring down a legitimate product used by millions of business users. Does NTP even make a product of their own? The main reason that I see this as a problem is pretty simple: software patents' shelf-lives are too long to do anything but make them a pay day for the lawyers.

I agree that software patents are bad for programmers, but this isn't a software patent case. And despite what some folks would have you believe, NTP isn't some patent troll. Yes, the guy who filed the patents in the first place is dead and it's his heirs who are pressing RIM for license fees, but hey - they're his heirs, they're entitled to whatever they inherited. Yes, NTP is an outfit formed to make money from "intellectual property" - but so are publishers, and we don't hate them.

As for having made a product, the original owner of the patent, Thomas Campana, did indeed attempt to use it. He built a company, he created products, he tried to make the business work. Like 90% of all new companies, he didn't succeed. But he realized that the technology he had created and patented had value to someone. He was absolutely correct about that - Nokia has bought licenses, and it looks like RIM will eventually have to also.

I don't know about you, but if I invented a better mousetrap (or hey - intermittant windshield wipers, the canonical patent infringement example) and died, I'd like my wife and kids to get paid for my work.

Looks like the Supremes don't read SlashDot

[feijai]

Every time an RIM story gets posted here, all we hear about is how evil NTP is, how its patents are going to be invalidated, how the patent system is evil, etc.

What's missed here is that NTP was formed largely because RIM was a first-rate jackass company.

Among NTP's primary shareholders are the actual inventors of the patents. Or perhaps I should say "were", as one of them recently died: RIM kept this bottled up in court that long. These inventors produced actual products at early computer tradeshows which ran email over a sophisticated wireless protocol to a PDA-like device. Sound familiar? The earliest such patents were filed in 1994 based on inventions several years earlier. Let's put this into context: the earliest Newton was in 1993, and the earliest similar device I am aware of was a PCMCIA pager card that could be put into the Newton circa 1995, enabling it to receive (but not send) messages over a pager network. This combination of technologies was both novel and original, and the inventors didn't just make them up to sell patents. But their company foundered.

Then came along RIM. RIM started selling the Blackberry and then started suing the daylights out of its competitors. Surely you remember this. RIM's nickname on The Register was "Lawsuits In Motion". When the original patent holders got wind of what RIM was selling, they realized it was largely a duplication of their patent. And so they contacted RIM and told them they were infringing. That's when RIM refused to return their calls. For a year.

This is not how ordinary companies operate. If someone owns a valid patent on your work, you don't refuse to even talk to them. So NTP was formed basically to force RIM to actually talk.

Legal battle ensues, and out come the slashdotters. NTP's patents are invalid and are getting all knocked down (um, the lynchpin ones are not). NTP is just a holding company to go after people (um, NTP was made to financially enable the original inventors to go after a specific company which was flagrantly violating their patent). Patents are evil (um, you know why patents exist, right? You're familiar with the evil that was the Trade Guild? No, I'm not talking about Star Wars).

RIM was repeatedly reprimanded in court by the judge for all sorts of obnoxious actions. And to top it off, RIM went to congress to ask them to override the judge because they'd given free blackberries to congress, and now wanted to claim that shutting RIM down would put the nation's security in jeopardy. I am not pulling your leg. Only Jack Abramoff could pull off a lobbying stunt more inappropriate.

And now the courts have sided ... against the slashdotters! How could the Supremes have not been reading the /. comment stream? What were they thinking?

Short answer: RIM is a nasty, obnoxious company which violated patents and sued people's pants off for things they didn't own. They got what they deserve. Too bad one of the original inventors didn't live long enough to see a dime from them.

Re:Yes, good point...

[dgatwood]

Except that, by definition, the owners of a patent do not have any right to claim liability by the users of a product that infringes the patents. The infringing party is the person or company that created it. Now, if you knowingly import or use a patent-infringing product with intent that the importation or use would circumvent a patent, you can be sued for contributory infringement. However, in practical terms, unless your reason for getting the open source software is because you tried to write your own and ran into patent issues, there's no real way for you to get into trouble, as the use of the software falls into the category of a "commodity of commerce", which is excluded explicitly from contributory infringement claims in patent law.

About the only plausible exception to this might be a business process patent which, if supported through the use of software, the software's user might be guilty of directly infringing upon that business process patent. However, this is a substantially different issue than the issue of software patents and liability, and could just as easily occur as the result of a CEO reading a how-to book instead.

IANALBIPOOSD.