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Morfik Defends IP Rights Against Google
ReadWriteWeb writes "Today Morfik came out fighting in defense of its product JST (Javascript Synthesis Technology). Morfik has implied that Google infringed its IP by releasing Google Web Toolkit (GWT) a couple of weeks ago. The reason? GWT bore more than a casual resemblance to Morfik's JST, which allows developers to use a high-level language of choice and have it compiled to JavaScript. GWT is similar, being a Java-to-Javascript translator. These Javascript compiler products are increasingly necessary for companies like Google, with the high use of Ajax on today's Web and the associated complexity of programming in Javascript."
These Javascript compiler products are increasingly necessary for companies like Google, with the high use of Ajax on today's Web and the associated complexity of programming in Javascript.
There's no associated complexity with programming in JavaScript. There's lack of progress in the language (still no native support of ECMA4 in browser, shame that *Flash* comes with ECMA4 implementation in just two months, before browsers do).
JS synthesis is a hack anyway. I've seen the code produced by such technologies, and it's crap. You trust your application's well being to the compiler authors with the hope they update it when it breaks in the latest and greatest browser out there.
The correct way to me is upgrading the JavaScript language itself, and until then, using native JS libraries that can be readily reviewed and edited.
JS as a language isn't so primitive as to require a Java or C++ compiler to write good and clean code for it.
They "own" the innovation? Some people have a really distorted view of the intent and philosophy of so-called Intellectual Property. As Thomas Jefferson so nicely put it: "He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lites his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."
If they think that Google could have actually copied their idea in such a short time, then they are admitting that they had no competitive advantage outside the recourse of litigation. More likely, they developed it concurrently. Google has been making fat web pages as they call them for some time now and I imagine that GWT started as a tool for inhouse projects.
"high-level language of choice and have it compiled to JavaScript"
Sounds like a pretty ambitions brief given the limitations
of javascript. Presumably you'd be very limited in what you
can do in the other language , for example I doubt some C++
database code would be cross-compiled successfully! Is it
meant just for people who only know VBscript or similar or
have they really tried to make it work with serious non-scripting
languages?
The idea of language translators is as old as mountains. Translating from Fortran to Pascal, from C to Assembly, from C++ or Perl to C, from Csh to Bash, from Awk to Perl. What's so new about Java to Javascript translator? The fact that the guys wrote another "to javascript" translator?
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
I doubt that any company would go to court to defend a claim that they own programming language-to-language translation. If they are, then they'll lose or have the case tossed out.
More likely is that someone at Morfik looked at the output from the google toolkit and noticed that it was suspiciously similar to the output from their own ("we never got the parens to line up properly for a nested if and google's compiler messes up in exactly the same way... hmmm" -- or something like that).
Of course, this is just speculation. Still waiting for something resembling facts...
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
I know of several Highlevel-to-Lowlevel language translators (e.g. Java-toC, Oberon-to-C, you name it) that have been around for decades. Surely, you cannot get a patent for doing the same thing with a different language, can you. Can you?!?
Compiling something to JavaScript in the browser environment is about as obvious as compiling to C on Unix. Case in point, here are a few other X-to-JavaScript compilers pulled off the top of my head: Python, Prolog, Oberon, etc. Seems pretty obvious to me. Not that that has ever prevented the US Patent Office from granting a patent, of course.
Can I suggest you invent a C-code to machine-code translator next (you could call it a "compiler"). It's the obvious next step in this genius innovation.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
The truth is, the solution that Morfik came up with is actually one of the two most obvious (to any software designer level IT professional that has done any significat amount of web-interface software design and programming) solutions for the "JavaScript libraries are not 100% standard and the language (the official name is ECMAScript) is bug-prone" problem. The solutions being:
Given the state of the USPTO i wouldn't be surprised in somebody already patented both "inovations"...
NTP's patents were bogus and they still got more than half a billion bucks from RIM. These guys may be gambling on being able to drag this case out to SCO's epic proportions. It would probably be much cheaper for Google to just pay them off.
I should have been a lawyer 'cause that's where the money is.
NOn should be able to claim IP on that tecnology. ... compilers!!!
JST technology (as well as any other similar one) resembles very closely to
You write down source code in a high level language like C++ and you get it translated into another target language like machine code.
The "other" language needs not to be at a lower level. You can translate from Fortran or LISP to C as well.
I'd like to see these stupid claims stop once and forever. Companies should focus more on business, research and, most important, customers!
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
Are they meaning patents, copyright or trademark?
Seems this case is either a patent or copyright-issue, but by not stating what "IP" has been violated, TFA is totally meaningless and open for speculation and confusion of the worst sort.
There is in reality nothing called "Intellectual Property".
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
http://haxe.org/intro
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
Ok, is this IP infringement? Nobody knows!
Did Google had a close look at Morfik's technology? Yes!
Does GWT looks a lot like what Morfik has done? Having used Morfik WebOS ApsBuilder for a couple of months, and given the GWT demos and description: definitely YES!
And please keep in mind Morfik's tool has A LOT more nice things! It is like Visual Studio and like Borland Delphi but for the Web, i.e. true RAD development invironment! And yes, it supports not just Java, but c#, Pascal and VB. It can target both Linux and Windows WebServers. Go see yoursef!
Sto
.. they needed a free advertisment on major news source..
1. Come up with a general (and funny) claim..
2. Attack Google
3. Profit!
As Thomas Jefferson so nicely put it: "He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lites his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."
In the letter of 1813 where this passage appears, Jefferson expresses some skepticism about the general utility of patents:
"Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices."
In fact -- though it was little appreciated at the time -- a burst of invention now called the Industrial Revolution was already well under way in England, Scotland, and Wales.
The specific role of patents in this revolution is open to debate. But it's quite clear that, during that time, Great Britain led the world in the invention of "new and useful devices". When Jefferson claims otherwise, he is completely and totally wrong.
..they should take it out on the street.
It's quite true. I just found out about it (and downloaded) it last month. Google's offering is nicely priced, but I'm not learning java for that... Morfik lets me use programming languages I already know which is FAR better... I'm sure google's product is nice if you already know java, but who's gonna learn java so they can use a java to javascript translator? I'd rather code in javascript directly then. Totally useless to me. It might take away a small part of their sales, but they're not quite doomed or anything.
It's interesting to see people coming out against the little guy in this. After all, often the argument is bandied about that IP laws are overextended and misused, yet this IS the way IP legislation is supposed to be used (protecting the little fish from steamrollering by the big fish), and clearly even this use in exactly the manner it's intended is completely farcical.
So rather than this being a frivolous suit brought to bear (if it is ever brought to bear, see the point about how this suit might not even exist, above), it's actually a pretty legitimate suit with a good case to answer, at least in terms of the law as it stands today.
Whether those laws should indeed be in place or are in themselves absurd is a matter that I don't think should be heaped upon this one little firm.
Ever use their web builder? It's crappy and unintuitive. I can't describe it except to say that this is the most likely way that they are going to see any real money from that product as is.
Well, it's good that many of you are so predictable. You have once again commented on something that you haven't even done the most basic research on in order to get a post listed sooner and mod-troll. So here goes: 1) Morfik is an IDE/RAD tool with a built-in PDF report writer, built-in web server (Apache) and built-in database (Firebird). The other tools to this point don't have any of these features. 2) Morfik allows you to write the code of your application using Java, C#, BASIC, or Object Pascal (client side or server side). You can also mix and match syntaxes to achieve whatever your goal is. It supports state-control, including the forward, back, and reload buttons, bookmarking, etc. so it doesn't break the functionality of your browser. GWT has Java support, and I believe supports state control, but I don't believe does it natively with a database, but I've only been playing with GWT since the public release, so I'm not 100% on this. 3) When Morfik was first featured on Slashdot a mere six months ago, it was met with skepticism and rancor. Now that Google has released GWT the /. tide has turned - apparently now that someone else has released a tool with a subset of the same features, it's obvious and uninteresting. Which is it? What a difference six months makes.
4) The issue isn't the release date of GWT vs. when they got a gander at Morfik. The issue is the start date of work on GWT, or Atlas, or whatever tool you're worried about vs. the date of the Patent application that everyone is complaining about, and the dates of the relevant documents that are cited in the application. Has anybody bothered to look either one up yet? Let's hypothetically say that the patent application was dated in March 2004. Now what? What about how all of this relates to Microsoft's progress on Atlas, or any of the other tools that are suddenly in development to build AJAX apps?
5) I don't see any of you asking what the relevant portions of the patent application are compared to the relevant features of GWT. Aren't these last two questions the ones that are really going to matter?
Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.
Never forget: 2 + 2 = 5 for extremely large values of 2.
The only indication in TFA about what specific "IP rights" are allegedly being violated is Morfik's pending patent on JST ("Javascript Synthesis Technology").
What, now you can assert patents that haven't even been granted yet?! What if the patent application is denied?
BTW, I have a pending patent on replying to comments on Slashdot. You all owe me $100 per comment. BTW, I'm going to vigorously defend my intellectual property by hiring two goons named Victor and Anthony to collect my license fees. Have an nice day.
It turns out there is a patent pending on Morfik's JST and today they issued a press release in defence of it.
Are we now going to see a series of patents on "translating language X into language Y" for all combinations of X and Y? Morfik's patent should be rejected, and it's a shame that the company can't be punished severely for even attempting to file such a patent.
In addition, Morfik's claims should be clearly recognized by everybody for what they are: an attempt to create far reaching new rights that would be devastating to this industry. Almost all successful products in this industry, whether open source or commercial, are to a large part based on clones or reimplementations of earlier systems. That's true for MS-DOS, Windows NT, OSX, Microsoft Office, Linux, Java, JavaScript, C, C++, and just about everything we use every day. If claims like Morfik's were allowed to stand and become widespread, the IT industry is going to turn into what the phone monopoly was to the US for many decades: overpriced and underperforming.
(I should add that I really don't care about GWT itself--Java is about as low on my list of favorite languages as JavaScript.)
AJAX (its no longer a buzzword people, its essentially now in the vernacular) is still very new and on wobbly legs, but there's no denying the doors it has already opened. We're only just beginning to get a glimpse of the lands these doors lead to.
Here's a small company from the smallest, most remote state of Australia made up of a handful of developers and associated staff, and look at who appears to be sampling their wares? This is a David and Goliath situation, no?
Should the Morfik team just shrug and say "oh well, hard luck guys"? Of course they should stand up and lay claim to what they believe in. I don't think they are claiming to have IP on language translation. I believe they are standing up because they see far too many similarities in the method of translation that just shouldn't be ignored.
This is where their innovation should hold its mark. This is where they invested many years, dollars and experiments to do something that had never been done before: breaking the boundary between the desktop and the web, and making it accessible to the countless Delphi, Java, C#, Access, etc developers to step in and create. They didn't coin the term ajax, but they most certainly were among that first set of pioneers that evetually led to this name.
If GWT did its thing without any familiarity to Morfik, but the end product was the same, the guts would look completely different. They would have to, given the complexity of the end goal. I believe its this similarity of the internals that has made them stand up and claim that it is not simply a coincidence.
If everyone just lay down and allowed the big boys in when they shoved, well then there would be only one big boy. How much innovation would there be then?
Before you decide that Morfik is trying to claim innovation where it is absent, have a look at the history of Morfik itself. It's not particularly short for the industry to which it belongs. Then have a look at the history of the founders of Morfik. The innovation goes back to the early days of Windows 3.1. They have not ridden the coattails of others and then preached invention.
They have invented.
I believe they have no intention of using the "dark side" of IP. They are simply using IP for the reasons it exists.
That group of response headers was for the file "hbx.js" (created by websidestory.com [hitbox.com], with two U.S. patent numbers prominently displayed in the first line). Note the Last-Modified date; how the Expires date exactly equals the current Date; and if that weren't enough, the two other lines unequivocally instructing any and all to not fucking cache the item.
It was just one of 29 files fetched, 217,085 bytes in total, for the site's [ati.com] main page. Only the 36KB main page HTML content itself was created anew out of the database "just for me" (I didn't note any difference in content from when I visited it a week ago, either, though I guess there could have been). Everything else had a median Last-Modified time of approximately 1 year ago. Every item has the cache control mechanism exactly as shown.
All of the "Products", "Support", &c. "buttons" across the top of the page, among many other common graphic elements, have to get fetched for every stinking page in the site. They must have unlimited bandwidth is all I can figure.
There are 8 javascript files taking up 64 KB of filesystem space here now as a result of wgeting the page and its requisites. You'd think since they're scripting the page out of a database that an initial javascript query failure would have saved them the trouble of sending all that crap.
As far as stuff like google maps, the last time I visited them the Back button (and I think Print as well) didn't work as expected of a web site. Neither could I bookmark the "page". If that's the way "web apps" are going to work they'll need a different interface than the web browser.
I ain't trolling; just venting.
Surely this must be more than just a language translator. Translation of a high level language to another language prior to compilation has been around for decades. Back in 1970 I wrote a program in DEC Fortran for a PDP-8 - and the steps to turn it into a running program turned it into assembly first, and then finally binary. Other such translators include the first C++ compilers that were really C++ to C translators, and of course for many years now FORTRAN compilers like F2C are really translators.
If this is all they have, they have nothing.
http://www.cliki.net/Parenscript http://www.cliki.net/jsgen looks like parenscript was there before october 2005
Dude! Learn! to Use! Punctuation!
If you're going to post AC at least provide some links to back up your claims.
And try not to sound so much like Morfik's marketing department.
Have you looked at Script#, a prototype C# to Javascript compiler/translater?
Compared to GWT, the generated code is beautiful...
http://www.nikhilk.net/Entry.aspx?id=121
The NeWS window system was programmed in PostScript, and was the original "AJAXian" window system, except that it used PostScript instead of JavaScript, PostScript instead of XML, and PostScript instead of DHTML, so it was much more consistent and vastly better designed than JavaScript and AJAX.
Some people didn't prefer programming directly in PostScript, so there were several projects to compile high level languages into PostScript code for NeWS:
In 1987, Dave Singer at Schlumberger wrote LispScript, a Lisp to PostScript compiler for NeWS.
In 1988, Rehmi Post at UniPress wrote C2PS, an C to PostScript compiler based on the Amsterdam compiler kit.
In 1992, Arthur van Hoff at the Turing Institute (the same guy who later wrote the Java compiler in Java) wrote PdB, a C++ to PostScript compiler.
OpenLaszlo compiles the high level Laszlo programming language (which is a combination of JavaScript embedded in XML) into Flash byte codes, as well as JavaScript that runs in web browsers.
This idea has been around for a LOT longer than the term "AJAX", or the JavaScript language.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
There is, in reality, something called "Intellectual Property".
The question is whether "intellectual property" is a useful abstraction over copyright law, patent law, trademark law, trade secret law, and publicity law. What is the term of protection of "intellectual property"? And especially for The Article, does a finding of infringement of "intellectual property" require access to the original work? Unlike mentioning a specific law (patent, copyright, or trade secret), "intellectual property" tells nothing as to the standards by which the allegations will be measured.
I believe they have no intention of using the "dark side" of IP. They are simply using IP for the reasons it exists.
Use of "intellectual property" as a blanket term is the dark side. It confuses patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets, which have different scopes, different durations, different requirements to defend, and more differences than I care to list. The only thing the laws subsumed under "intellectual property" have in common is that they grant some sort of exclusive right that can be transferred or licensed. People who use the "dark side" have a vested interest in such confusion, so as to increase the perceived scope of their exclusive rights.