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Why Software Patents Are a Joke — Literally
eburnette writes "A former Sun/Oracle employee explains how developers created patents in an unofficial contest to see who could get the goofiest patent through the system. James Gosling said, '... we got sued, and lost. The penalty was huge. Nearly put us out of business. We survived, but to help protect us from future suits we went on a patenting binge. Even though we had a basic distaste for patents, the game is what it is, and patents are essential in modern corporations, if only as a defensive measure. There was even an unofficial competition to see who could get the goofiest patent through the system. My entry wasn't nearly the goofiest.' Now Oracle is using patents from the same folks as the basis for its lawsuit against Google."
The way patent law works now, nobody can just start up a business and invent shit. They need mountains upon mountains of patents to fight against other companies with mountains of patents. Then they need an army of lawyers to examine their inventions to make sure it doesn't violate any patents. I applaud these guys for making a mockery of the USPTO, although they were beaten to it by the USPTO themselves.
You mean big companies bribing the system to allow patents on asses.
Table-ized A.I.
Whats next? Entire cultures seeing suicide as something cool that should be tried at least once by anyone?
This is a problem with the patent system, not with software patents themselves. The software industry is more affected because it depends much more on innovation than other industries. Plus, with the speed at which the technology moves, the length of a patent is effectively much longer than in other industries.
that it's Sun's patents that are being used in this litigation. Imagine if the patents were original Oracle submissions?
He seems to mean this primarily in terms of compliance with the official Java specification but one could also look at it in terms of software patent action against FOSS. I recently wrote about Microsoft's use of patents in connection with open source and got bashed for simply telling the truth: so far it's actually other companies who make the truly hostile moves. Far be it from me to defend software patents; I just mean to point out that there are different ways in which they get used, and in light of Oracle vs. Google, I believe more people will agree with me now.
One group of people James Gosling doesn't criticize are all those former Sun execs who strongly supported Oracle's acquisition of Sun because it was financially advantageous for them, only to leave the combined company as soon as possible after the closing of the deal. Many of those told the FOSS community that Sun had patents that could be very dangerous for open source, and Oracle was such a "reasonable" patent holder that it would be much better for them to acquire those patents than to take any risk that maybe Microsoft (which by the way never made a bid for Sun) could get them.
I opposed Oracle's acquisition of Sun. I also had concerns over the Java part but kept quiet about that and focused on MySQL. That's because I cooperated with Monty (the original author and founder of MySQL) and he wanted to be neutral about programming languages. For those who heard the slander that my work in that context aimed to change MySQL's license from the GPL to something else (which some even propagated here on Slashdot), I've meanwhile posted a detailed explanation, including links to several documents I used during my fight against the Oracle/Sun deal, in order to provide conclusive evidence that I argued against -- not for -- a license change. You can find that information in this blog posting (the link leads directly to a passage on MySQL and the GPL).
Thanks for the complete lack of information in both summary and article as to whether any patent involved was filed as a direct result of this joke. (In before 'ALL OF THEM ARE JOKE GOOFY MAXIMUM LOL')
For years I've been criticizing all those fake solutions to the patent problem, such as "patent pledges" or the Open Invention Network (OIN). Both Google and Oracle are licensees of the OIN. The OIN patent agreement is meant to be a non-aggression pact between its members, with respect to "the Linux System".
Given that Android is a Linux distro (and a strategically very important one), it should be fully covered by the OIN as the self-proclaimed protective shield for the Linux ecosystem. Consequently, Oracle should be prohibited by the OIN cross-license agreement to sue its fellow OIN licensee Google. I'm not the only one to have raised that question. I saw Simon Phipps (OSI board member, former chief open source exec at Sun, now at ForgeRock) and Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Law Center (and formerly FSF) raise the same kind of question on Twitter/identica. Now TheRegister contacted the OIN and wanted a comment on Oracle vs. Google, and the OIN declined to comment.
By the way, Eben Moglen promoted the OIN big time at LinuxCon, just a few days before Oracle announced its lawsuit.
What's certainly not a fake solution (although difficult to achieve) is the proposal to abolish software patents. The EndSoftPatents.org campaign runs the software patent wiki and has a pretty informative Wiki page on Oracle vs. Google.
The people here are either geeks without big company experience or just completely uninformed. In big companies people are patenting not for the sake of patenting but just because it means more money at the end of the month and even for the upcoming months ... you get money on disclosure, on EPO/USPTO filing and jackpot is when it is finally granted...
Get over the patent troll kids...
I have over 40 patent submitted and about 25 granted(it takes time ...).
But what about possible proxy wars of Microsoft? Some funding of SCO, apparently. Or sabotaging ISO standarization via small partners (OK, this one not exactly about patents; but showing modus operandi)
One that hath name thou can not otter
I wanted to recommend this detailed blog posting (about 8,500 words, plenty of scrolling) on Oracle vs. Google.
It discussed many aspects of the dispute and in particular goes into detail on the seven patents Oracle seeks to enforce against Google, and inhowfar they may or may not read on Android.
I posted a correction in the comments there to point out that Oracle changed its stance on software patents years ago, not just after acquiring Sun's patent portfolio.
Government interference at its finest
By government you surely mean a corrupt system controlled by big corporations.
Why do you hate their right to be successful?
One that hath name thou can not otter
SCO is a copyright case. While copyright litigation can also cause problems, there's a fundamental difference: you don't infringe copyright inadvertently. Theoretically you could, but practically you won't just by coincidence write a significant number of lines of code the same way someone else did. But patents are broad and you can infringe them totally unknowingly. That's why programmers who make independent creations never have to worry about copyright but unfortunately do have to worry about patents.
Concerning standardization, both Oracle and Google (as well as IBM and Red Hat) are member of "OpenForum Europe", a lobby group in the EU that pushes for "open standards". Here's a blog posting in which I criticized the hypocrisy of that group last month. If you look at the flawed Java Community Process, that's also a serious standardization problem.
All large corporations try to use the patent system or standardization processes and standards policy to their advantage...
He seems to mean this primarily in terms of compliance with the official Java specification but one could also look at it in terms of software patent action against FOSS. I recently wrote about Microsoft's use of patents in connection with open source and got bashed for simply telling the truth: so far it's actually other companies who make the truly hostile moves. Far be it from me to defend software patents; I just mean to point out that there are different ways in which they get used, and in light of Oracle vs. Google, I believe more people will agree with me now.
You totally misinterpreted his comment, and it looks intentional. Gosling is obviously stating that Microsoft is a horrible company, but the rest of the industry has become so much worse recently that Microsoft seems benign in comparison (i.e., it is a sad truth). Microsoft is still the mortal threat to open source that it has always been.
I'm going to come right out and say it, I guess, since I'm posting AC anyway: I suspect you're shilling. This stinks like a PR campaign.
2. If you notice someone is using your invention, DON'T SUE
3. Wait for them to actually succeed, and invest time
If someone convinces a judge that you did this, then you can't collect damages under the "laches" rule.
He tried to patent the light switch and switching lights on. ...
All of it is pretty silly, but Claim No7 contains some gems:
7. A method for controlling electrical power coupled to a plurality of electrical devices, said method comprising the steps of:
- providing a control unit comprising an identification map
- connecting said electrical power from a power source to each of said power outlets;
Which can describe the wiring in the wall.
Similarly, the Government Accounting Office (GAO) recently obtained an Energy Star certification for a gasoline powered clock radio, among other things. It's a pencil whipping operation with no credible investigation of manufacturers claims. Worry not! The EPA has since announced reforms to this stellar program, so have no doubt that whatever price premium such august recognition demands is worth every certified penny.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
Even though we had a basic distaste for patents, the game is what it is, and patents are essential in modern corporations, if only as a defensive measure.
I really appreciate their work at mocking patents law system, but I can't agree with this part. While we can't change patent laws, we can at least avoid having them. We're not forced to patent our ideas just to protect them, because nobody can make sure the very same patents won't be used for suing other developers. I live in Iran and our patent system isn't as silly and as serious as America's, but I'm trying to avoid even this. I've come with an idea for a new Persian soft keyboard for our own commercial product. Everybody says "it's so innovative. How are you going to patent this?" I'm totally avoiding this, even at the risk of our brand new idea being copied by the others. Fortunately my company is supporting this, but alas, our chance for changing behavior of big companies is even less than odds of changing patent laws.
"If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it's still a foolish thing."
Just about anything and everything has been patented. Even minute variations in between. I really wish we could go back to core roots of what held society together. Service and customer support. That's where the importance should be laid at, not tangible goods.
Of course, tangible goods are very important too. Which is why I'm in favor of temporary patents. We don't need to be feeding the lawyers and stifling innovation. Some idea of a patent system is a nice system to have (but not abused). The idea is that you're granted enough time to start up and monopolize, but soon expires. It's a "use it or lose it" certification. Regardless of the outcome, everyone gets a fair shot without fear of litigation.
Life is not for the lazy.
Pirate Party is not only against patents on software, we work actively against it.
Hm, though Android is currently essentially branched from the Linux, kernel, into its own tree; even with bits of unmaintaned contributions to the mainline deleted...
Yeah, we know it's still Linux for most practical purpose. But such perdiod of (basically) forking could be something to drag legal proceedings on for years, I guess... (in the meantime seeding doubt among manufacturers, etc.)
One that hath name thou can not otter
Just to make this clear, I don't mean to defend everything Google does or did, especially in connection with Android. Most Android-based phones appear to be closed source in practical terms, and the forking you mention plays a role in that.
But the OIN is not about free software or open source values. It claims to protect companies in the open source ecosystem, and Google became a licensee a couple of years ago and now sees that it doesn't get any benefit from its membership.
What IBM does with Websphere/Apache is also forking by the way.
They don't ask a simple question, a very simple one.
"We have our technology preinstalled to near billion handheld/mobile devices. We have industry giants who submits their own enhancements. Opera Mini (and soon Locago) proved those users will care to install something if it means something to them. So, what was wrong with J2ME and why Google went their own way instead of enhancing J2ME?"
If you can get answer, ask any high level executive in MS what would they feel if some MS technology, like "silverlight lite" was preinstalled to dozens of different brands, thousands of models. Man they would kill for it.
They should sit and pray to Norwegian gods that something like Opera Mini exists or device manufacturers would have no problem removing J2ME from future models.
something funny was going on in the USPTO.
Tomorrow is another day...
All inventors must sign an oath stating that they have disclosed all information known to them to be material to patentability. If you think your patent is invalid from the start, you are under an obligation to disclose whatever prior art you think is relevant. Am I the only one who finds it a little disturbing that luminaries are now admitting to fraud on the patent office?
If "successful" means destroying all innovation, progress and freedom to develop - just to be able to kill every starter that is getting a little ground, I think you can really hate that kind of "success".
Athletes will pay first...
I started to feel like Oracle's acquisition of Sun will end up like Amiga focusing on CD32, Sinclair spending millions to ship that weird C5, IBM rejecting Win32 API on OS/2. You know tech stories like "Company was doing great, if they didn't make that horrible decision."
I was telling they can't be that stupid to undermine Java or MySQL, things turned out to be very different. Java and J2ME already have some questions and as this patent lawsuit is on, I am sure some companies question their inclusion of java techology in operating system, devices. Did you also figure IBM is still silent about this? If I were Ellison, I would think about it.
Wh(a)((t))?
There was some "patent blogger" on first story regarding this absurd decision by Oracle. Guy was actually giving "Mono", yes Mono as example of how things should be done.
Perhaps some companies actually started to think that open source guys are dumb? I mean you come to a story speaking about a big company suing other for patents and you come up with mono advertisement. One really has to have balls to do that on slashdot.
I beg your pardon?
Don't you mean "Large Corporations abusing a system designed to protect inventors and using it to push forward a monopoly?"
At least other companies have the balls to initiate their own action, rather than chickenshittedly throw money at a proxy because they themselves have stolen code and numerous violations on their hands.
On a related note, I got some pussy around 9pm Pacific time. I opened 'er up like a Christmas present. Wait, what was Florence_Nightengale selling again? Sorry, bro, I already use MySQL.
Android has pretty much played out the way that we feared: there is enough fragmentation among Android handsets to significantly restrict the freedom of software developers.
The notion that Android suffers from a huge fragmentation problem seems to be repeated everywhere, but I really don't understand where this is coming from. I've developed JME and Android applications and the amount of fragmentation on Android is mostly non-existent. Apart from some small number of device-specific bugs (that are fixed with phone updates) that won't affect most Android apps, cross-device development is a breeze. I remember JME development was way more troublesome, where model-specific versions were the rule instead of the exception.
Wouldn't it be cheaper to lobby against SW Pats? You know, just thinking "out of the box" here, but lobbying to have software patents repealed would be a LOT cheaper. Even if all you had were PR moves about how bad and/or silly they are, the Judge would have known of it and not been so lenient about awarding patent damages, reducing the cost before the SWPatent deal was done.
AC has a point up there, especially when you consider that Microsoft doesn't sue openly, but instead makes all of its threats quietly (see also Novell's little pact, as well as various little or unpopular distros making similar pacts...) There's also the TomTom case. Microsoft wasn't exactly a Boy Scout whipping around that FAT32 patent like they had.
SCO was a copyright case, but in Microsoft's eyes, IP is IP (Ballmer has a nasty habit of not making distinctions in that particular realm either). Also, while in a similar post you go on and on about how one doesn't "inadvertently" infringe copyright, you missed something. Fact is, SCO posted (IIRC) as their one and only public 'encrypted evidence' snippet... a piece of BSD-licensed code that drifted into SysV's reference codebase even before the whole AT&T vs. Berkeley fights (I know, I know - Early Pleistocene and stuff). BUT - the point stands: anyone who has taken even a cursory glance at the whole BSD vs. SysV legal wars (and more importantly, their outcomes) knows better than to say something like "you don't infringe copyright inadvertently". Sheesh.
But anyway - while they're not as noisy about it (given their record of losing so many of such cases, little wonder why), Microsoft does do more than the usual amount of backroom intimidations and back-alley shakedowns in this whole "intellectual property" circus.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
235 software patents infringed in the kernel.
Sound familiar?
How about the FAT32 patent?
Or the projects closed down because MS threatened them?
Yes, everyone else does it too, but MS does it and it's not DEFENSIVE.
It is a really important story. When you read the patent, it becomes obvious that the patent was issued for something that is not any innovation and had been in use for years. Now the author of the patent himself admits that openly. So, what the consequences will be? Not for the battle (Oracle vs. Google) but for the war (humanity vs. patents)? None. The patent system is so deep rooted, so many things depend on it (like the value of so many corporations) that practically nothing can be done. It's frustrating: we all know it's bad, but also know it will stay this way.
http://www.bestfreesoftware.eu
I think part of the patent problem isn't so much what one can patent although that's part of the problem. But how patents are written in such a broad and ambiguous manner that it's easy to see why they're open to such abuse. Change the way they're written to the narrowest and clearest interpretation.
I'm not saying the patent system isn't broken, but...
If I understand the story correctly, the company lost a lot of money because of a patent they thought was a bit stupid, decided to get patent protection for all their new projects, this guy and his buddies thought it would be a great idea to waste even more money patenting dumb stuff. Does he still work there ?
If the RISC patent was so obvious, why didn't the company spend money getting it invalidated and then get all their costs back? (rather than wasting it on something they believed to be pointless)
About 18 years ago, I did the same.. We had to come up with patents for a product that was the owner's pet project... Well, I had to come up with a patent too, since I had worked on the project, so I wrote up a patent for a steering wheel. It was a complete joke and i used as much obfuscation as I could, describing complex equations defining circular motion such as X^2+y^2=1 and the likes.. It had the other engineers in stitches... We all thought it was hilarious and the boss slipped it into the pile to go to the patent office so they could enjoy the joke as well... Some time later the boss came in stony faced and simply said "The patent for the steering wheel. No one ever jokes about it again. Ever. Period." then walked out. Seems it was the only patent that stood up to scrutiny.... All the rest were rejected... So, the owner of the "Timezone" amusement centers around Australia formally owned the patent on every electronic steering wheel that controls a vehicle... Ever invented. Anywhere. Even if it uses mechanical linkages. Especially if it was in the shape of a circle, but it also counted if was a joystick that could be moved through a "virtual circle"... Not that it didn't stop the engineers rolling around on the floor laughing for a few minutes when I told them all. Yep. another literal joke patent... And to their credit, they all kept a straight face when the "Big" boss came in to congratulate us all.
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
I think he means "corruptee works for its corruptors".
Now, the question is: what and when are american people going to do anything about it? Start by sacking the two party system, please.
The case is nothing to do with Linux, it's to do with Java. The fact that they are running Java on Linux is irrelevant, and doesn't contravene the OIN.
Both Google and Oracle are licensees of the OIN. The OIN patent agreement is meant to be a non-aggression pact between its members, with respect to "the Linux System".
Given that Android is a Linux distro ...
I don;t see how Android being a Linux distro is relevant in an "aggression" conducted on Java-related patents. Would you please care to elaborate?
Not saying that I do agree with software patents, not saying that OIN is a good or a bad thing, just saying that Linux != Java != Dalvik, thus the OIN issue have little relevance in my opinion. I mean, some (countries/govs) can agree to a non-proliferation nuclear pact and disagree on a carbon emission trading scheme, right?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Big government is good! Private companies are evil and only want to destroy, not create. We should all wait for government to tell us what to do, otherwise we might do the wrong thing. Ignorance is strength, dissent is racism, freedom is slavery, the clocks are striking thirteen.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
The Tom Tom case is exactly what justifies the Novell case.
MS has a number of patents and - as the Tom Tom case shows - thay could attack Linux if they want (whether they'll win or lose on the long run after counter-attacks is one thing to consider, but the average Linux distro violates many MS patents - the start button or FAT ones for example). MS violates Tom Tom patents too and we can suppose it violates Novell ones.. I guess on networking but who knows really. So MS has an interest in cross-licensing to avoid patent wars.
They propose alliances left and right - to Tom Tom and Novell. Novell agreed. Tom Tom disagreed, MS sued, they found an out-of-court agreement and now they have patents cross-licensed.
The arguments of the average slashdotter are:
1) Linux is such a great piece of engineering
2) You can't write a significant piece of software without violating patents
3) MS saying Linux distros violate its patent is bullshit
The three arguments are somewhat contradictory (unless you pretend MS is stupid and has only useless patents) and given the evidence of the first 2, we can quickly conclude that number 3 is false.
I love it when people say things like bribing the "system". System doesn't take bribes, people (politicians) take bribes.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
All you need to do is publish your ideas to the general public. Prior art destroys any patents if it was released before the patent. Even if it doesn't, it will when it goes to court.
Which makes OIN rather meaningless. Linux is a tiny part of any Free Software system. In terms of binary size, it's easily dwarfed by the C and C++ standard libraries; X.org, various toolkits and so on make up a bigger blob. People have been using 'Linux' as a term to describe this entire system (and shouting down people who say GNU/Linux because 'Linux is the important bit') for so long that it's easy to forget this. If the patent pledge only affects Linux, then it doesn't cover 90% of the code on a typical Linux system.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
"There was even an unofficial competition to see who could get the goofiest patent through the system."
I believe this is how Amazon's 1-Click patent got started.
I was at the london science museum last week and saw something interesting on the information board regarding one of the steam engines on display. Unfortunately I didn't think to take a photograph / transcribe it, but this blog gives a summary: http://www.currybet.net/cbet_blog/2006/08/engineering-parallels-at-the-s.php
To quote the blog's transcription of the caption:
In 1769, James Watt had taken out a patent that allowed him to dominate steam-engine design and improvement. As a result, other engineers were prevented by law from developing new, alternative designs."
When the patent expired other engineers were able to innovate again, particularly Richard Trevithick. He experimented with using steam under a much higher pressure, and as a result was able to build smaller and more powerful engines, which enabled him to build the first locomotive railway engine capable of hauling a load.
So even the science museum is suggesting that patent's stiffle innovation, and have been doing so for over 200 years
Depends, do you have meet QA assurances to customers? I know we've dropped QA assurance for Android devices from our contracts now unless the client asks for specific models with specific OS's. We still offer a QA assurance standard for iOS based applications because it's not costing us $8k a year for hardware like it was with Android for iDevices. Making sure your application runs on android isn't a problem. Guaranteeing it works well across a range of devices is a different ball-game.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Suffice to say that had Google built upon Common Language Infrastructure (CLI), C# and associated core libraries a similar situation would not have been possible. Microsoft has made a legally binding "promise" (legal term estoppel) that they cannot sue for infringement of any patents which covers the specifications. On top of that, Microsoft has open sourced .NET Micro Framework with similar patent grants. Oracle's legal leg here is that Dalvik is not covered by patent grants associated with OpenJDK, because it does not live up to the requirements - e.g. it is not a full Java SE implementation and it has not passed the compliance cert.
So why is it exactly that you think Mono is such a bad example? Seems to me that if you cut away all of the FUD thrown at Mono, Miguel was right all along: The CLI and C# is absolutely open and safe from MS patent litigation.
It is correct that some of the higher level parts of the .NET Framework are *not* covered by a similar patent grant. These are parts such as ASP.NET, WCF, WPF. All of which are either irrelevant or over the top for a small-footprint platform.
Even if you implement these APIs, it is not clear that MS has patents which would disallow that. You cannot patent a public API, you may be able to patent an implementation (a "machine").
Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*
Well, that's true for all software that runs on a multitude of hardware.
To abolish software patents, you need to create a real financial incentive for that. We simply need more patent trolls.
Its not only in software patents, but also in other fields.
A city in Austria just got a patent on beeing the center of europe.
Gosling is obviously stating that Microsoft is a horrible company, but the rest of the industry has become so much worse recently that Microsoft seems benign in comparison (i.e., it is a sad truth).
It's true. I admit I've recently been thinking less bad about Microsoft. I'm not going to be a fan any time soon, but MS seems to have remained rather stationary on the Evil scale (possibly even edging slightly away from the evil end, but that might be an illusion), while everybody else seems to be in a hurry to overtake them and dive off the deep end of the scale.
10 years ago I didn't think it was possible, but in the mean time many companies have proven that it is indeed possible to be far more evil than Microsoft.
The instigating event that caused the patent mess is not corrupt companies, but the government having the power to grant patents in the first place. Areas where the government is expressly forbidden to regulate, such as religion and (most) free speech, are also free of corrupt businesses attempting to bribe the government. You can't bribe congressmen to do things that they can't do.
Big companies are good! Govemernt is evil and only want to control, not regulate. We should all be grateful when the companies mercifully exploit us, otherwise we might try to compete. Ignorance is strength, strikes are racism, freedom is an 80 hour workday at $3 an hour, the clocks are striking thirteen.
Patents, at face value are required.
If you went through all the trouble of inventing say - the google search engine algorithms - then I shouldn't have the right to nick your sourcecode and use it myself without paying you for it.
In that case its fair.
When its not fair is when you lock down an 'idea'. Now in other things it makes sense, but in software, where even a single idea 'A way of sorting lists' can have tons of different implementations (ex: bubble sort, quick sort, trees etc...) in software its not a very fair or good idea.
The main problem is the government not moving with the times - and the corportations ready to snap on it for their own monopolies.
Kinda like the copyright laws.
Because they do it largely at everyone else's expense. Who said "success is a right" anyway? Success is not constitutionally mandated.
I think it's more a case that MS are licking their wounds right now, or maybe you forgot just how evil they were in their heyday - there's no reason to believe, if they manage to reverse recent trends and come out back on top, that they wouldn't return to form.
We continue to put our faith and trust in corporations and religions as the approach that will deliver humanity from the growing environmental crises that face it, largely because of the faint hope that we may find ourselves among the favored few. Yet as we watch corporations, their lawyers and the righteous battle it out and stomp on the "little people", its not hard to figure out where this is all headed. If humanity has another 300 years, I would be surprised.
Comparing to iDevices is a little bit unfair as there's only one manufacturer that makes those.
To put the F back in Fragmentation: For each Android device our QA has 50 J2ME phones.
Software patents are to the IT community as malware is to operating systems.
First thing to do with a new Windows machine is to remove the Symantec crap which it came infected with. As what to do with all those lawyers I'll just refer to Shakespeare and leave it to you, dear reader, to interpret this quote by the Bard of Avon...
--frank[at]unternet.org
I don't think he meant that. I don't believe software patents were ever designed to protect inventors, rather they were always intended for use by large corporations to limit competition.
I think it's reasonable to conclude that software patents are working exactly as they were intended.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Companies like Oracle might reasonably be able to argue that Android is a distinct environment, one which is relatively kernel agnostic and certainly doesn't correspond with a typical desktop or embedded Linux distribution.
That's an interesting point - all of the biggest corporations now own swathes of patents and their reasoning is always along the lines of defence by mutually assured destruction, or we're just holding them so others don't use them for evil, or we don't like them but we have to play the game. Are we seriously meant to believe that if the Googles, Microsoft's and Apple's of the world shouted loud enough the government would refuse to listen? The truth is more likely that every company hates IP that can be used against them, but loves IP they can use against others, and the big companies love the status quo of being able to throw up effective barriers to entry against the little guys.
Which is a system that works perfectly... assuming you can afford to defend yourself against a huge corporation dragging out a costly court case over several years.
>> Patents, at face value are required.
>> If you went through all the trouble of inventing say - the google search engine algorithms - then I shouldn't have the right to nick your sourcecode and use it myself without paying you for it.
A) That would be copyright infringement.
B) How would you legally get the source code?
How does being patented do anything to help here?
Tell that to the judge just before forking over 1M in legal fees. A valid defense and sure win can still be very expensive.
A) Sorry, but I don't speak lawyer. Last time I was corrected on this I got the impression that a 'copyright' is there to protect a company image while 'patent' is there to protect what the company invents.
B) Reverse engineering is only illegal because you're doing it on something patented. Reverse engineering the Linux kernel is legal.
Doesn't matter.
If you come up with an identical work independently, it's yours. Copyrights govern the actual act of copying, not the nature of the work as such.
So if I write a program to produce every possible combination of words in the English language with a total number of words in each between say 30,000 and 600,000 , I will have my own copyright free version of every English language novel ever written including all the Harry Potter series? Come to think of it I will have the copyright on every English novel yet to be written.
Better get started on that plan now, shame the number of possible combinations is probably more that the total number of atoms in the universe but I'm sure we'll find a work round for that.
N.B. this user is far too lazy to write a witty and intelligent sig.
They (politicians) are the system. If you are systematically bribing politicians, you are bribing the system.
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
... is for a LIGHT SWITCH! Either the guy is brilliant for weasling that one through or the patent office is sleeping at the (Gosling patented) switch for letting that one through.
Link or it didn't happen.
The point is that he is implicitly defending the government which runs the patent office and blaming businesses for bribing the "system" while ignoring the fact that if that is true then it is government officials that are accepting bribes.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
It's a pity that people continue to rail about something undefined - 'software patents'. What is patented is a technology/technique, often realizable usually in many ways. Think about codecs - these are signal processing patents, essentially. And why should software be exempt from patents when other fields (e.g. mechanical instruments) are not?
James Gosling is the man who is ultimately responsible for creating Java from the beginning. He was the inventor of Java, the VM and Compiler.
Some time later the boss came in stony faced and simply said "The patent for the steering wheel. No one ever jokes about it again. Ever. Period." then walked out. Seems it was the only patent that stood up to scrutiny.... All the rest were rejected...
Not trolling, really don't understand what happened. Was it:
1) Boss realised the Patent Office did the most brain-dead thing: approved your steering wheel patent (because it's full of obfuscation) and rejected the rest (because they're too plain text), OR
2) Australian Patent Office realised boss was trying to be funny, and rejected everything?
So, the owner of the "Timezone" amusement centers around Australia formally owned the patent on every electronic steering wheel that controls a vehicle...
I still don't understand. Is your company in Australia?
Patent the patent, then cease-and-desist the US Patent Office. Then when the patent office revokes the patent of the patent, the news media can run headlines of "Patent Office Revokes Itself".
Sun Microsystems /also/ funded SCO in the beginning of the SCO attacks on IBM.
You can separate the states and companies now?
That's news to me.
Not completely unfair either as there are about 50 times more J2ME phones as there are Android powered devices :)
But what might be interesting to know is how often your QA department finds model-specific errors on J2ME and Android devices.
That the patent web site violates the patent that James Gosling applied for.
Its always bugged me that patents seem to be written to gain ownership of the problem instead of the solution.
With a decent set of problem-solving skills, its easy to think about likely solutions to particular problems. Simple application of commonly-known problem-solving techniques leads quickly to certain solutions.
Finding that a single patent somehow manages to cover all applications of all techniques is frustrating. That is more like patenting the problem.
Finding that a patent-holder never actually built anything that ever worked is even more frustrating. Fiction is supposed to be limited to copyright and trademark.
Since the granting of a patent is the establishment of serious rights under the law, the granting process should be equally serious.
You mean "figuratively".
http://xkcd.com/725/
At a video game studio I worked at, more than one programmer there genuinely felt that software patents were a good idea.
The rationale being that if software patents were abolished, then other companies could just copy what other people had put a lot of R&D into developing, creating a situation where braving into unmarked territory in software development becomes too risky to engage in for all but the largest companies, and so software innovation is slowed overall.
I'm not saying I agree with this, but that was the prevailing mindset.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
no, he means "government interference at its finest." If the government had not set up the US patent office, we wouldn't have any of these problems. Certainly it was designed to protect inventors, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
That's not to say that he wasn't being short-sighted, since we would probably have other problems as a result. The only difficult part is figuring out which set of problems is less grievous.
I'm not convinced that the patent system is broken. If we actually examined patents to begin with, the system might be fine.
But we don't. The guy here just patented a lightswitch. Others have patented swinging on tires. Forget legal wrangling, this is raw "Should Never Have Been Approved" territory.
Considering the rule of thumb is that it costs 5 grand to patent something, of which only 500 goes to the USPTO to check the patent, maybe we should up that number significantly. An additional 1,000 to the USPTO should give enough time for two examiners to spend a full day each investigating the patent. That extra %20 on the front end could save millions on the back.
Of course, everyone who works in upper management in the patent office should be fired immediately and sent to jail.
The ______ Agenda
Most Android-based phones appear to be closed source in practical terms, and the forking you mention plays a role in that.
Apache license allows for that though. If you criticize Android based phone being closed, you are criticizing the Apache license, and only Google indirectly for using it. But if they used another license, they would be criticized for using that as well.
Except that the suit isn't about Linux, it's about Java. The fact that Android happens to run Linux is immaterial. Google could have used Windows CE with Dalvik on top and still be hit with the same suit.
Android is a key Linux distribution and Dalvik is an essential component of it. Also, someone else commented somewhere else on this thread that the Linux kernel itself is only a small percentage of all code of a Linux configuration.
OIN doesn't say it protects only the Linux kernel. It protects "the Linux System" according to its own definition. That definition is listed here. It's a long list of program files, and for an example, it includes Apache, which actually is available for Windows, too (unlike Dalvik), and which certainly isn't an operating system module.
That's what my criticism of the OIN is not exclusively but largely about: they have a very arbitrary definition of the scope of "protection". Why is Apache listed? Presumably because IBM, which is OIN's most important backer, has a strategic desire to protect Apache. If Apache is protected, I don't see why Dalvik shouldn't be. But OIN isn't about objective criteria. It's all about the strategic interests of six companies owning it, and plenty of others who become licensees are misled and misguided.
He seems to mean this primarily in terms of compliance with the official Java specification
Unfortunately Sun (now Oracle) does not allow Apache to get an official copy of the test suite for that compliance, so they've set it up so that the Apache Harmony classlibs (used by Android) can't possibly be compliant. According to Nutter, the patents are worded so that you have to infringe them if you want to be compatible with existing Java code. But if your implementation is not compliant then you can't get patent protection. And if you can't get patent protection you get sued. That doesn't seem fair.
There is some fragmentation if by fragmentation you mean there are implementation details that differ enough on different phones that you have to code around them. For example, phones running Android versions before 2.0 did not support multi-touch, and phones running 2.0 and later do. Also, even among the phones that do support it, some are buggy and give you strange touch-points that didn't really happen that you have to filter out.
By and large, though, developers can write a single program that runs on all or nearly all Android devices on the market. In this sense, Android has little or no fragmentation. Either way, it's better than J2ME ever was.
Reminds me of this one:
http://www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT5443036
These companies have a team of on-staff lawyers, who are probably just looking to spend their legal budget.
I really didn't appreciate Oracle much before, but I am starting to rank them lower than Microsoft and possibly even SCO. Maybe the next big database I will recommend will be Sybase or DB2. As for Java, and as a Java developer, I really feel torn. Oracle: stop hurting my former best friend.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Heh. In Android practically the only software fragmentation comes from Android version and kernel parameters while in J2ME it's often as if the world was written from scratch for each phone.
I get a "never encountered before"-type J2ME bug maybe once every few months. But that's because we have accumulated quite a bunch of workarounds.
There are maybe 2 issues on Android I could compare to those although strictly speaking they are not "model-specific errors" either.
Proof or GTFO.
Note: hand waving and other fallacies do not qualify
Most Android-based phones appear to be closed source in practical terms, and the forking you mention plays a role in that.
The phone manufacturers may make their devices closed (locked boot loaders, etc.), but the Android operating system itself is open (see the AOSP). I'm running a source-based version of Android 2.2 (Sapphire) on my Droid 1 phone right now. Google can't control the amount of lockdown the handset manufacturers or the carriers apply.
God is imaginary
You can patent an ass?
"An apparatus for expelling unneeded effluent in a biological organism?"
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
The point stands. After Google invested the time, effort, and money to develop their search algorithms, they should have some protect against others using the same techniques, not necessarily having access to Google's copyrighted code. That's where patents come in.
Are some/many software patents silly or frivolous? Sure. But, the same applies to traditional patents as well. In both cases, I think the threshold for patentability is set too low. I mean, should sticking a goose-neck lamp on then end of a flashlight really be patentable?
As for the IP terms:
"trademark" protects the company's brand(s)
"copyright" protects creative works (text, photos, source code, etc.)
"patent" protects how things work
Now you're stretching it. While it is obvious that Rupert Murdoch's media empire is nothing more than a multibillion dollar propaganda business for American conservatives and the Republican party, to claim that they are doing this at the behest of China is just being silly. They would be doing this with or without the influence of China because they mistakenly believe that their actions won't result in America being ground into third world nation status; on the contrary, they think doing these things will make them rich (which technically speaking, it will in the short term).
A wide variety of remote controlled cars and other assorted toys could also be covered by this patent.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
everyone has their own stake and claim.
Sorry but the real world doesn't work on good will and good works alone.
Never mind that iOS is a complete mess when it comes to "fragmentation". Far far worse than Android which has about 4 major versions out there. iOS has at least a dozen, all of which still have MAJOR user bases, and all of which need to be supported indefinitely. Add to that the different devices, with widely different screen sizes and user interface styles, whether it is "classic" iPod Touch/iPhone devices, or the newer iPad's or now the even newer iPhone 4. So if fragmentation is a bad thing for Android, it is an unbelievable clusterfuck for Apple.
lol ... oh man, Gosling's patent basically describes every digital circuit in existence, some of which existed before he was even born.
The system is more than the individual politicians though. The trouble is that when you have two candidates running for office, the one who accepts bribes ends up with a bigger campaign war chest, can buy more advertising and ends up going to Washington. The result is that everyone in Washington accepts bribes, because anyone who didn't, lost an election to someone who did. You can blame the politicians for that if you like, but the fact remains that if you want a solution, it's not "get better politicians" but rather "get better elections." We have better politicians, they just don't get elected.
My main point is that we are becoming a bribocracy because big co's influencing our gov't more so than voters.
Table-ized A.I.
From what I understand, the case isn't about Android's use of Linux, but about the customized JVM which runs on top of Linux. Does the OIN cover things that run on Linux as well? Such as, if I were running Apache or some other http server?
I commented on this elsewhere in this discussion: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1756418&cid=33275698
Indeed, Apache is covered, and so are lots of other things that go way beyond the Linux kernel. The problem is that the OIN has that completely arbitrary approach to determining what's on the list and what's not. I actually suggested four alternative ways to address that problem, but it seems they don't want to change anything. They want the OIN to continue to be totally intransparent (which in terms of litigation would be understandable, but the definition of the scope could be a transparent process). And they want it to simply benefit the six companies owning it, but not the 100+ licensees including Google.
Reverse engineering is not illegal, patent laws explicitly allow it. (at least in the USA, at least for now)
The majority of Microsoft edging away from the 'evil' end has been purely practical in my view -- they've improved their products, they're, fairly obviously, working hard to improve the security and stability of them, and as a result are actually producing something useful finally. From a pragmatic point of view, this makes them less evil than a corporation who has all the philosophical evils of today's Microsoft, but produces crap like Windows ME.
You know, I see some folks gloating that this will hurt image of Java.
It will hurt image of Java, especially if Google loses.
But do you understand what is happening here? The patents that are claimed to be violated are on such obvious things as using offsets, mixing interpreted and inlined compiled code, assigning properties that are security restrictions onto pieces of code, copying memory to do forking of code fast, things like that.
It's insane, this really is crazy, the patents are killing the field.
Does ANYBODY LIKE ORACLE?
I fucking HATE Oracle. Their database is relatively OK, but their management is SCO-like, and in my vocabulary it means: they are pieces of bull excrement.
I HATE Oracle with passion, I was contracting for BellTV for a bunch of years, we had Oracle salesmen in sheep closing, pretending to be developers/analysts/designers, whatever, they were marketing/sales people, they were pushing Oracle solutions for everything, they HATE competition from anything, try to spread FUD on all others.
But this is also NOT about Oracle, just like it is NOT about Java.
This is about the entire concept of patents.
Patents need to be stopped. Patents need to be killed. All patents, on all things. Economies are dying now for the sake of saving patents. Innovation is killed for the sake of saving patents.
Anybody for patents is my enemy.
You can't handle the truth.
Here's a blatant self-link (to my company's blog, no less) -- my business partner is pretty sure he invented prior art on these patents in high-school:
http://www.cardinalpeak.com/blog/?p=633
Scientology?
The RIAA and MPAA?
android is as much linux as osx/ios is bsd. Basically, the open source parts are there to act as a RAD framework for the proprietary libraries and UI (or is it UX that is the marketoid-speak of choice these days?) stacked on top.
consider how a device cant legally bundle the apps needed to access the google services or android market unless they fill all the checkboxes of some document google have written. Or that one need a gmail enabled google account before one can even access the free section of android market.
it would not surprise me if Andy Rubin have some plan B to go bsd in his desk drawer if push comes to shove.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Goddamn I love you, EF.
Yes, but Java really isn't part of the Linux ecosystem.
Java has always been a heavily restricted, heavily patented, badly designed platform that Linux and Linux desktops have justifiably stayed away from.
Gosling rightly points out that, whether or not one approves of the patent law system, it is nonetheless the governing system, and anyone wishing to compete or survive in contemporary corporate culture must incorporate IP protection into the company strategy. Not only are patents critical defensively, but they can also serve as quite a powerful (and often lucrative) asset if patent enforcement measures ever need to be taken.