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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."
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.
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.
The software industry is more affected because it depends much more on innovation than other industries.
In particular, it depends on the incremental innovation, whereas almost all new inventions are typically (and in some cases by logical necessity) are old inventions slightly reconfigured. Patents stop the incremental innovations in its tracks, since an "inventor" of a killer app has all the reasons to sue everyone in sight and none of the reasons to improve on the app. And even if the patent holder does use the monopoly profits to innovate further, it cannot possibly make up for excluding everyone else from the process. Imagine for a moment that a compiler was patented. Only a few biggest players could then afford licenses required to develop commercial software, and free OSes like BSD or GNU/Linux would be illegal. Proponents of software patents must admit that that is the way we should have went: if anything deserves to be called an innovation in software, a compiler certainly does. They also must close their eyes on the fact that the free software community produced and now maintains not one, but two best OSes of today, while competing with an entrenched monopolist. Anyone who believes that software patents are producing any good for the society is either grossly misinformed about the software market or is an enemy of the public (that is, a corporate cock sucker) and a hater of the computer science in general.
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.
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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.