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Yahoo Beats Patent Troll That Beat Google
jfruhlinger writes "You may recall the saga of patent troll Bedrock, which claims that it has patents over Linux and successfully sued Google over Google's Linux use. Well, the verdict from Bedrock's suit against Yahoo on similar grounds has come in — and Yahoo is victorious, not least because Yahoo went second and got to see how the arguments in the Google case went."
"Yahoo!" is both the victorious party and our cries at discovering the victorious party.
Slipstreaming.
Wow, you can add 2 and 3 like that? Patent Approved!
- USPTO worker #217
Just because Yahoo wasn't found to infringe doesn't mean Google didn't (regardless of what you feel about the validity of the patent).
Just as I expected:
"First off, Bedrock had a stronger case against Google. Cawley put on evidence that Google used Bedrock's Linux code on its servers (although Google got rid of the code before trial). Yahoo, on the other hand, used a different form of Linux, and its lead trial lawyer, Yar Chaikovsky and Fay Morisseau of McDermott Will, were able to argue that Yahoo never executed the Bedrock code."
The case against Google was much stronger hence they were found to infringe. So since the cases seem to not be exactly the same, I'm guessing that Google bringing up Yahoo's case is going to mean very little to the appeal's court.
How does that help the patent trolls buy Ferraris?
The linux kernel is modular. You can execute some parts and not others. They were able to argue that they didn't use the part of linux that could infringe this patent.
Different distributions compile their kernels with different options with different things enabled or compiled as modules.
"Sometimes it's hard to tell the dancer from the dance." --Corwin Of Amber in CoC
I almost wonder if some of these patent trolls are literally surfing through old theses and essays on algorithms from the 60s to the 80s looking for concepts that they can slap a stamp on and send to the patent office. For god's sake, there must be hundreds of examples of garbage-collecting hash tables from that period of time. It's hardly a novel or unique concept.
I'm seriously expect someone to come along and patent Quicksort. If you can patent garbage collection on a hash table, then why not sort algorithms?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
If google inadvertently ran bedrock's code, does that mean they went beyond patenting obvious stuff and into submitting code into gnu/linux that was intentionally patent encumbered?
The "distro" would be whatever Google's internel fork of the linux kernel used on their servers is.
Yahoo ... used a different form of Linux
i.e. FreeBSD?
Best patent I've found? Computing the absolute value of an integer. Yes, really.
Currently owned by Oracle, previously by Sun.
Not really all that fair. When Yahoo started Linux was not as mature as BSD. Today FreeBSD and OpenBSD are both good OSs and have features that Linux lacks because of issues with the GPL like ZFS. Dismissing BSD is just a bit biased. Linux does have more hardware support but for server class hardware I bet both have pretty good support.
Now logically it makes a lot of sense to go with Linux today if for no other reason than the large number of people that have exprence with it but when Yahoo started that was not the case and frankly changing OSs is not trivial thing to od.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Until (IIRC) 1986, that was the case. Software is composed of algorithms, and algorithms are by definition mathematics, and mathematics can only be discovered, not invented. So until 1986 no software patents were awarded. I think the first one was a Honeywell patent for a combined hardware/software system for an air conditioning controller.
The most egregiously bad deal about software patents is the huge list of software inventions going back to the dawn of computing, for really important stuff like virtual memory, dozens of compiler methods, the windowing GUI, many different aspects of the systems that underlie the internet, etc., that could not be patented - in retrospect those thousands of real inventors got a raw deal. I made several advances in my work in the late 1970s and early 1980s that could now be patented. All those innovations back then were either shared effectively as open source, or protected for a while as trade secrets. Now trolls can patent silly trivialities and make zillions of dollars, depending on a huge edifice of real work that they get to use for free.
And, of course, if those innovations could have been patented the entire industry would be 30 years behind where we are now.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
You make very good points, however I worked at Yahoo for three years and supporting three OSs was killing them. In 2003 BSD5 and Linux 2.6 were released. Assume a year for the new OS to stabilize, a year to get your internal plans together, and by 05 or so you should pick an OS and run with it. I arrived at Yahoo in '06 and found that RHEL was a second class OS to the main choice BSD4. BSD6 was just starting to show up on production machines and there was/is still tons of internally waffling about what OS was going to be the future. BSD5 never gained any traction and I think there were less a a few hundred servers with it installed.
By late 2006 Yahoo was maintaining its stack on BSD4, BSD6, and RHEL. And by stack I mean everything. Yahoo doesn't maintain an OS so much as everything else other than a base OS. However depending on the project you were on half your technology was either Linux only, BSD only, BSD4 only, or BSD6 only depending on the zealotry or skill of the team building it. Also things like yahoo-libxml moved at different paces on each OS. So you might get .17 on RHEL and .18 on BSD.
Then there were the teams that just wouldn't let go even after Yahoo had officially declared no new BSD4 servers in mid 2008. One of the largest sites at Yahoo was until last year running their Mysql databases on BSD4. And BSD4 doesn't multithread. At all. In fact Provisioning had to refuse to give them any more 8 core machines until they moved off BSD4 which still took six months of negotiating. I myself had to fight for nearly a year to move the frontend of another site to BSD6 from BSD4 in late 09. However that was Apache/PHP so we only saw a 20% increase in throughput.
In any case whether Linux or BSD, they should have picked one. If they had properly addressed this issue and picked Linux in 2005 like everyone else on the Internet they'd be in much better shape today and maintaining their stack would take half the man hours it currently does. Hell same with BSD, but frankly the mindshare of Linux and people who know how to use it still make Linux the better choice.
Lastly changing OSs is hard and it doesn't get any easier the longer your company is around. If anything Yahoo has certainly proved to me that changing even OS version is hard.
They just escaped from the troll's grasp.
This is extremely off-topic, but I can't resist... :)
Additionally, I'd just like to point out that the term "Garbage Collection" alludes to a ridiculous analogy. Seriously. When's the last time the garbage man came into your house, decided you didn't use something based on the amount of dust on it, then hauled it away without asking? Never... (GC should be called Maid Service, or perhaps Vengeful Mother-in-Law Disposal instead).
Well, I always imagined a program in a "garbage collected" language as someone using stuff and dropping it on the ground when they don't need it anymore, without paying too much attention to what they're doing. Eventually, the "garbage collection" service comes over and collects what was dropped.
IRL, You decide what you want in the garbage, then place the collection of those items in the designated receptacle prior to a garbage collection pass.
That is close to what happens in languages without automatic garbage collection: calling C's "free" and C++'s "delete", for example, is the equivalent of taking the time to decide something is garbage and placing it in the garbage can.
Additionally -- DON'T THROW AWAY THE RESOURCES! PLEASE RECYCLE THEM! -- THEY SHOULD NOT END UP IN A LANDFILL! (Garbage Collection would be a more fitting name for a "memory leak")
In almost all situations, the system "recycles the garbage" immediately after it recognizes it. Some exceptions: run a garbage collected language with the garbage collector disabled, or replace C's "free()" with an empty function (people sometimes do this when they *really* need performance). In those circumstances, if the program generates enough garbage, eventually it runs out of resources (memory) because the generated garbage is not collected and recycled.
When they taught you two's complement didn't they tell you that to negate a number in two's complement you toggle each bit and then subtract 1?
v = (v ^ -1) + -1
And using an arithmetic right-shift to copy the sign bit across the full width of the int is hardly novel either.
Why on earth is Slashdot still linking to so many articles on IT World? Their journalism is spotty at best, and they were the site that caused the whole Samsung keylogger false-positive fiasco.
Cawley put on evidence that Google used Bedrock's Linux code on its servers (although Google got rid of the code before trial).
Not to put too fine a point on it, but nobody used 'Bedrock's Linux code'. Bedrock doesn't have any Linux code. They have a patent on an idea that's implemented in Linux code written by Linux developers with no help from Bedrock. Whether that idea is worthy of patent protection is another story entirely. Ummmm.... NO!
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
Don't tell me you fell for the "don't hate the player" line. The system may well be broken, but that doesn't mean you should abuse it for personal gain.