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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."
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.
Here's the algorithm
1. Patent an 'invention'
2. If you notice someone is using your invention, DON'T SUE
3. Wait for them to actually succeed, and invest time. money and creativity in creating something useful that's loosely based on your half-baked idea that you patented
4. Sue the successful company
5. Profit
or just randomly sue successful start ups until you find one that used your patent
Patents have really lost their purpose.
By the way I've just patented
1 step one
2 ???
3 profit
pattern so from now on I can sue anyone who used a systematic approach to generated profit.
P.S.
Anyone else chuckled after reading the name Charles Nutter?
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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?"
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?
... in America.
This week China became #2 economy in the world. Don't you think America that it is time to worry about keeping up with innovation, USA ? You won't top Chinese labs with lawyer companies.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
They're not admitting fraud. They're admitting submitting patents that are ludicrous according to the standards of common sense, but valid according to the standards of law. They are admitting bending the rules as much as possible without breaking them, and demonstrating exactly how insane the rules actually are. They are not admitting to breaking the rules.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I disagree on one point only. The first is not "Patent an invention" but "Patent a sci-fi concept that in the future will be realized as a real product/service by someone".
This is simply absurd. You cannot patent a lamp without a working prototype of a lamp, but you can patent an abstract software concept without showing USPTO a single line of code.
You obviously don' t understand. Rupert Murdoch owns Fox News, which owns the republican party. The Chinese are shrewed enough to recognize that Murdoch can be easily manipulated by his insatiable greed. To maintain his business in China he has to do what the Chinese want, which is to insure that America's ability to attend to its political and economic problems are overwhelmed by mind numbing, inane "info-tainment" to rile up those incapable of thinking for themselves or support the debt they incur, yet who, by virtue of their numbers, can obstruct progress directed toward solutions of any kind that might set America on a path of "innovation" or "success". America is doomed to being caught between Glenn Beck and the lawyers, who represent Murdoch and his corporate clients. Technical advances in all spheres of human activity will steadily gravitate toward China until about 2020, when the Chinese overtake the US and call in our debts.
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.
Link or it didn't happen.