NoOOXML.org has been actively reporting on the process and tracking irregularities since last June or so. The list is very long and we're still collecting information.
You've written 6000 pages of specification largely in secret (and, I understand, recently added over 1500 more pages) and given the world five months to read, absorb, understand, review, critique, and establish informed positions on it. Worse, whether it happened because of unreasonable methods, pure random chance, or genuine and unexpected interest, the fact that the size of the JTC 1 Subcommittee that was to vote on the document suddenly exploded gives the appearance that somebody was trying too hard to stack the deck...almost as though it wasn't really desired to have too much real review.
BTW SQL was one of the largest ever ISO standards and took 20 years to debug. It was still smaller than OOXML.
Disclaimer: I paid the extra $1,000 for a SSD with my MacBook Air, so I'm probably biased, but most notebooks I've owned has had disk drive issues. It seems part of the price to pay for portable computing. Maybe I'm just brutal with them. The HDDs used in iPods seem more robust but they're slower than normal notebook drives.
The main value of an SSD in a notebook is therefore that the notebook will last longer and there is much less chance of losing data due to disk failure.
Additionally, SSDs are a bit faster, and they're silent and use less power. They are also a little lighter, I assume.
On the down side, they're really expensive and writing files is slower so I guess you want to have lots of RAM and avoid swapping.
In 3 years they'll cost 10% of what they cost today, and they'll be in more than 50% of notebooks.
I don't see the advantage of SSDs in desktops, where it's trivial and normal to have full backups, and where power consumption, noise, weight, etc. are less important.
So it's a little inaccurate to see SSDs as direct competitors to HDDs, ultimately they address two distinct markets, high capacity vs. high reliability. SSDs are always going to be for secondary computers, and portable devices. Of course it's also true that these compete with desktops.
Re:Multithreading is not easy but it's doable
on
Panic in Multicore Land
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
It's unfair to compare blob messaging with a protocol that has to process XML, but let's look. I'm using http://www.ejabberd.im/benchmark as a basis:
- eJabberd latency is in the 10-50msec range. 0MQ gets latencies of around 25 microseconds.
- eJabberd supports more than 10k users. 0MQ will support more than 10k users.
- eJabberd scales transparently thanks to Erlang. 0MQ squeezes so much out of one box that scaling is less important.
- eJabberd has high-availability thanks to Erlang 0MQ will have to build its own HA model (as OpenAMQ did).
- eJabberd can process (unknown?) messages per second. 0MQ can handle 100k per second on one core.
Sorry if I got some things wrong, ideally we'd run side-by-side tests to get figures that we can properly compare.
Note that protocols like AMQP can be elegantly scaled at the semantic level, by building federations that route messages usefully between centers of activity. This cannot be done in the language or framework, it is dependent on the protocol semantics. This is how very large deployments of OpenAMQ work. I guess the same as SMTP networks.
0MQ will, BTW, speak XMPP one day. It's more a framework for arbitrary messaging engines and clients, than a specific protocol implementation.
I've seen Erlang used for AMQP as well - RabbitMQ - and by all accounts it's an impressive language for this kind of work.
Good question. The answer is "no, not as far as we're aware"; the patent covers the distribution of transactions across network nodes, invisibly to applications, and is specifically aimed as implementing GUIs. From the patent, "The invention disclosed broadly relates to graphical user interfaces (GUI's) and particularly relates to the software architectures used to implement them."
However, all software patents have the problem of "creep", so that if a market emerges that looks within reach of the claims, the patent holder - if litigious - will try to expand the scope of the patent to claim this market. The claims of this patent, which are what really count, are written in fairly abstract language.
It is impossible to clear new software for patents - the cost would exceed $1bn - so we just have to try to stay away from known danger areas.
More constructively, we also support the fight against the software patent regime, at least in Europe.
Multithreading is not easy but it's doable
on
Panic in Multicore Land
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
It's been clear for many years that individual core speeds had peaked, and that the future was going to be many cores and that high-performance software would need to be multithreaded in order to take advantage of this.
When we wrote the OpenAMQ messaging software in 2005-6, we used a multithreading design that lets us pump around 100,000 500-byte messages per second through a server. This was for the AMQP project.
Today, we're making a new design - ØMQ, aka "Fastest. Messaging. Ever." - that is built from the ground up to take advantage of multiple cores. We don't need special programming languages, we use C++. The key is architecture, and especially an architecture that reduces the cost of inter-thread synchronization.
Inter-thread synchronisation is slow. If the code is local to a thread (and doesn't use slow devices like network or persistent storage), execution time of most functions is tens of nanoseconds. However, when inter-thread synchronisation - even a non-blocking synchronisation - kicks in, execution time grows by hundreds of nanoseconds, or even surpasses one microsecond. All kind of time-expensive hardware-level stuff has to be done... synchronisation of CPU caches, memory barriers etc.
The best of the breed solution would run in a single thread and omit any inter-thread synchronisation altogether. It seems simple enough to implement except that single-threaded solution wouldn't be able to use more than one CPU core, i.e. it won't scale on multicore boxes.
A good multi-core solution would be to run as many instances of ØMQ as there are cores on the host and treat them as separate network nodes in the same way as two instances running on two separate boxes would be treated and use local sockets to pass messages between the instances.
This design is basically correct, however, the sockets are not the best way to pass message within a single box. Firstly, they are slow when compared to simple inter-thread communication mechanisms and secondly, data passed via a socket to a different process has to be physically copied, rather than passed by reference.
Therefore, ØMQ allows you to create a fixed number of threads at the startup to handle the work. The "fixed" part is deliberate and integral part of the design. There are a fixed number of cores on any box and there's no point in having more threads than there are cores on the box. In fact, more threads than cores can be harmful to performance as they can introduce excessive OS context switching.
We don't get linear scaling on multiple cores, partly because the data is pumped out onto a single network interface, but we're able to saturate a 10Gb network. BTW ØMQ is GPLd so you can look at the code if you want to know how we do it.
Actually, the term "intellectual property" dates back to the French revolution (1790's) and the patent system. The older term used to be "exclusive privilege" and referred to the monopoly over a market that the sovereign would grant to his friends in business. After the revolution the French patent industry decided to rebrand itself and also began to discuss the idea of perpetual copyright.
A lot of things are going wrong for Microsoft right now...
- "Vista Ready" is starting to mean a huge liability
- The EU seems determined to make Microsoft stick to the rules
- MS's OOXML effort is running into real resistance
- Apple keeps taking more and more of the desktop and laptop market
- The EEE PC has finally turned Linux into a mainstream "feature"
- Trying to buy Yahoo has made MS look really weak in Internet services
- Its "we'll sue Linux for patent infringement" FUD is convincing no-one
- It's being sued persistently by patent trolls in the USA
I'm just wondering if 2008 will be the year that sees Microsoft humbled by the market and its own inability to deliver products people actually *want* to use.
A whole lot of people are going to sing and dance in the streets if things do go badly wrong for Microsoft. They don't have a lot of friends left, unless they're willing to buy them.
SOAP is not a competitive threat to Microsoft. And even if it was, the lack of litigation threats in SOAP means nothing more than "so far, so good", which is not proof of anything. You cannot prove that OSP is safe by pointing to the lack of issues in a non-controversial domain.
It appears that Microsoft has about 280 patents around OOXML and related technologies. It also has a large number of patents that read on ODF. We're making a list of these and hope to be able to publish them soon.
There are also several patents from third parties that read on OOXML, and in theory ISO should halt the process while these are examined and cleared. It looks like ISO won't do that.
Microsoft has several techniques to keep OOXML a captive standard controlled by a single vendor. Complexity is one. But patents are the very best technique.
Note also that OOXML's complexity is mostly because it's a dump of a legacy format. Some upcoming MS ISO proposals are very clean technically, but also very heavily patented.
It seems clear that the OSP is worthless for GPL implementations, the biggest threat to Microsoft.
At the same time it's worth noting that the format being voted on by ISO is not the format implemented by Office. There are over 2,300 changes and the two formats are not compatible. The reason for pushing for ISO standardisation is to let MS market their formats as "standard", while in fact implementing non-standard vendor-specific formats. And then, using patent threats against anyone who tries to reverse-engineer those.
It's a nice con trick. Many national bodies have realized what's going on but many are too corrupted or too ignorant to understand.
I have a MBA with SSD. The battery lasts 4-5 hours for normal work but some graphics-heavy work (like video or using coverflow for browsing) uses the CPU heavily and drains power faster. The SSD is silent and _very_ fast in some important places. E.g. startup of OpenOffice.org takes about 3 seconds in place of 15 seconds on my MacBook. It is a snappy machine. OS/X does not need the horsepower of Vista. The design is obviously minimalist, you need to appreciate "less is more" to like the MBA. The closest match for it is the Sony X505, which was also designed to be supermodel thin but which had a poorer build quality. My X505 was slightly warped, and died from some internal power failure, and was unrepairable. It cost 2-3 times what the MBA costs, and battery life was 1.5 hours max.
The MBA is a very beautiful machine, and part of the beauty is the minimalism. The machine is also elegantly designed, the aluminium casing feels tough and smooth. It's almost instant on, after a sleep, and the keyboard backlighting is very useful.
Overall, I much prefer working on the MBA than my MacBook, and the only thing I can seriously say is missing from the MBA, or wrong with it, is that I can't (yet) run Kubuntu from USB.
It would be really interesting to know what percentage of computer users share files...? In my informal surveys, the figure is really high, 80-90%, and the people who do not share files don't do it simply because they don't care, or don't know how.
I have never, once, found someone who actually states that they have a moral principle against it.
The whole "piracy is theft" campaign seems as empty as the "don't smoke pot" campaign. People will do it, and just find ways of not getting caught.
Not a troll... since the EEE showed the way, when I see a nice ultraportable I have to ask whether it will run a slim, fast, and low-cost Linux, or whether I'll be forced to install Windows. Having killed my last Windows box a couple of years back, having a choice of operating systems (RedHat, Ubuntu, Kubuntu,...:-) is now my number 1 criteria when buying a portable.
Trade secrets are very hard to keep in any case. There are a million ways that trade secrets leak out, most trivially by people taking a good look at the products in question. If a secret could be really kept, the person holding it would not seek a patent. There would be no point. Secrecy is a cheaper and more efficient protection for a market, if it's possible. The patent protects ideas that cannot be otherwise protected. So in fact you have it completely backwards: the patent system protects ideas that are otherwise unprotectable.
And since disclosing ideas before they are patented is harmful to getting a patent, the patent system actually discourages disclosure and promotes secrecy.
Society gets the worst possible deal - monopolies in exchange for ideas that would become public knowledge anyhow, and increased secrecy in areas where collaboration is needed for innovation.
It's not a sane system. It exists because of the logic of power and money and history, not economic logic.
Don't forget that the patent establishment has invested a huge amount of money and effort, over the last 150+ years, to promote a mythology to support its claims to perpetuate its system of exclusive privileges. The myths are deep and taken as real by many who should be more skeptical. I debunked the main myths on Free Software Magazine.
One of the big old myths is the "inventor" and "invention" myths. In fact, innovation is well understood (since the mid-1800's at least) to be a social effect, driven by market demand for new products and enabled by technological progress. Produce a new material in cheap enough quantities, and dozens of "inventors" will come up with similar new applications for it.
Of course there cases of lone inventors who work outside the rest of society - these are so rare they prove the general case that invention is the result of a social network. And this social network, which may be less obvious in some industries, is absolutely central to the innovation process in software, which is why the concept of software patents is to utterly bogus and corrupt.
Patents of all kinds are just a form of protectionist economics, along with trade barriers, subsidies, legislated monopolies, and so on. These work for those who can work the system, everyone else pays the cost.
What few people realize is that patent law trumps competition law. This is one reason large technology firms are so pro-patent even when it creates huge risk for them. Collusion between firms that would be considered illegal cartel-forming, and result in 20-year prison sentences, becomes 100% legal when there is a single patent involved.
What is happening to Vonage is what happens to every aggressive competitor in a market dominated by incumbents and protected by patents. It does not matter how innovate a new firm is. It will, always, infringe on a basic patent somewhere, and end up in a war of attrition that the incumbent will usually win. The innovator has two choices: die, or sell out.
Patents do not drive innovation, not in software and not elsewhere except maybe, maybe in pharma. They promote the self interest of large business and of the patent industry, period.
Note that Microsoft's patent war on FOSS goes along exactly the same lines. Convicted monopolist pleads guilty (in the EU) and move toward a patent licensing business, blessed by the regulator, which allows it to destroy and/or buy up its real competition.
This is about the strongest argument against software patents. They are literally a tool used by cartels and monopolists to control or destroy their competition. It's amazing that after 150-200 years of this discussion, governments still don't realize what kind of damage they do.
This is most definitely not about software patents, it is about business method patents. This has no effect on software patents at all. It simply stops the patenting of mental processes that are vaguely assisted by technology. You can be certain that software patents - on designs, algorithms, procedures, whatever - are as strong before as after this ruling.
Am I the only one that finds it deeply ironic that this ruling came because an "inventor" (patent jargon for 'lawyer') tried to patent something that would affect other lawyers? The CAFC does not care a jot about engineers, programmers, designers. But it does really care about inventors, sorry, lawyers.
You're absolutely accurate. In fact this morning someone asked me "why does the site not have a photo of the kayaks?" and I answered, "because we used canoes, not kayaks, but we liked the sound of 'kayak' better. And, if I put up a photo, some smartass is going to point and say, 'dude, those are canoes, not kayaks'".
I just love being right on a rainy Brussels afternoon.
"by court order" from who? The decision announced today actually states that Microsoft must license its patents for a reasonable fee. There is no precedent except in cases of national emergency to impose mandatory licensing, and absolutely no precedent for a model that would allow FOSS competitors.
Even the USA, in WWI, had to push aircraft patent holders to create a patent pool, it could not impose mandatory licensing. This option is exceptionally rare, and the EU Commission exceptionally weak. It is exceedingly far-fetched to imagine some random court is going to make such an order.
The very mention of mandatory licensing (for free, to competitors like Samba) will unite the entire patent industry in a fervor of hate against those proposing it. No EU Commission I know is going to risk that.
You are wrong. Software patents are valid in most European countries, depending on how the claims are phrased. The UK is almost alone in rejecting 'pure' software patents. National courts are more skeptical than the EPA but Microsoft is working hard on a plan together with the EPA to remove patent litigation from these national courts and bring it to a central court that would be much mopre friendly to software patents.
Remember that Microsoft is aiming for 5-8 years in the future when it will finally have to pull out its heavy weapons. It is calculating and hoping that it will have a big portfolio of legal, enforceable software patents in Europe by then.
In the meantime many firms regularly go to court to enforce software patents, and win. Microsoft can easily, trivially, bankrupt any team or company simply by forcing them to start legal action.
So even if a patent is not finally upheld, it is a very powerful monopolistic tool. The only safe escape for FOSS is a regulated ban on software patents that invalidates all the EPA's (illegally granted) software patents.
Before we all rejoice, consider that (a) Microsoft can, and will appeal, delaying any verdict by another three years (b) the fines amount to about one month of net profits, (c) Microsoft is building a new franchise strategy based on software patents that makes this ruling irrelevant. I predict MSFT's share price will wobble and then climb as this sinks in.
The largest monopolist in history has faced down the largest economy in history, and won. It was the delay that mattered; during those six years, software patents have changed the rules. Patents trump anti-trust law (a cartel deal that would result in 20 years jail for the execs that signed it becomes legal when a single patent is added to the mix). Microsoft is using this to trump whatever the EU does.
We are very close to seeing the FOSS world split into two, one half owned by Microsoft and acting as a franchisee, and the other half operating in increasing 'illegality'. The only real competition to Microsoft's global monopoly in one of the most vital of industries is the FOSS economy, and it's the patent threat that the EU should have been looking at, not the out-of-date issue of documentation and bundling.
Please consider joining the global fight against software patents - join the FFII, start a national chapter, and get involved. Only the community is able to defend itself against Microsoft, our politicians and courts are totally out-manoevered.
This decision was only for the U.S. and it's not over there. Look carefully at the comments by those who voted, and you'll see there is room for changes. Look at Lexmark's comment...
It's very important to understand that the OOXML fight is not over. Microsoft are doing a fantastic job of explaining to committees why this format deserves to be an international standard, and of ensuring no-one gets onto the committees who can raise this dreamy proposition.
We are looking at a lot of votes between now and end-August, across the world, and it's still not too late to submit comments to - for example - the Australian Standards Authority, which will almost certainly vote YES to OOXML.
On NoOOXML.org the FFII is coordinating the fight. If you've not signed the petition, please do so.
Slashdot Mirror
NoOOXML.org has been actively reporting on the process and tracking irregularities since last June or so. The list is very long and we're still collecting information.
Here's a little of what Jim Melton, the ISO SQL editor, had to say about the OOXML process:
You've written 6000 pages of specification largely in secret (and, I understand, recently added over 1500 more pages) and given the world five months to read, absorb, understand, review, critique, and establish informed positions on it. Worse, whether it happened because of unreasonable methods, pure random chance, or genuine and unexpected interest, the fact that the size of the JTC 1 Subcommittee that was to vote on the document suddenly exploded gives the appearance that somebody was trying too hard to stack the deck...almost as though it wasn't really desired to have too much real review.
BTW SQL was one of the largest ever ISO standards and took 20 years to debug. It was still smaller than OOXML.
And, Please sign the NoOOXML.org petition if you didn't already!
Disclaimer: I paid the extra $1,000 for a SSD with my MacBook Air, so I'm probably biased, but most notebooks I've owned has had disk drive issues. It seems part of the price to pay for portable computing. Maybe I'm just brutal with them. The HDDs used in iPods seem more robust but they're slower than normal notebook drives.
The main value of an SSD in a notebook is therefore that the notebook will last longer and there is much less chance of losing data due to disk failure.
Additionally, SSDs are a bit faster, and they're silent and use less power. They are also a little lighter, I assume.
On the down side, they're really expensive and writing files is slower so I guess you want to have lots of RAM and avoid swapping.
In 3 years they'll cost 10% of what they cost today, and they'll be in more than 50% of notebooks.
I don't see the advantage of SSDs in desktops, where it's trivial and normal to have full backups, and where power consumption, noise, weight, etc. are less important.
So it's a little inaccurate to see SSDs as direct competitors to HDDs, ultimately they address two distinct markets, high capacity vs. high reliability. SSDs are always going to be for secondary computers, and portable devices. Of course it's also true that these compete with desktops.
It's unfair to compare blob messaging with a protocol that has to process XML, but let's look. I'm using http://www.ejabberd.im/benchmark as a basis:
- eJabberd latency is in the 10-50msec range. 0MQ gets latencies of around 25 microseconds.
- eJabberd supports more than 10k users. 0MQ will support more than 10k users.
- eJabberd scales transparently thanks to Erlang. 0MQ squeezes so much out of one box that scaling is less important.
- eJabberd has high-availability thanks to Erlang 0MQ will have to build its own HA model (as OpenAMQ did).
- eJabberd can process (unknown?) messages per second. 0MQ can handle 100k per second on one core.
Sorry if I got some things wrong, ideally we'd run side-by-side tests to get figures that we can properly compare.
Note that protocols like AMQP can be elegantly scaled at the semantic level, by building federations that route messages usefully between centers of activity. This cannot be done in the language or framework, it is dependent on the protocol semantics. This is how very large deployments of OpenAMQ work. I guess the same as SMTP networks.
0MQ will, BTW, speak XMPP one day. It's more a framework for arbitrary messaging engines and clients, than a specific protocol implementation.
I've seen Erlang used for AMQP as well - RabbitMQ - and by all accounts it's an impressive language for this kind of work.
Good question. The answer is "no, not as far as we're aware"; the patent covers the distribution of transactions across network nodes, invisibly to applications, and is specifically aimed as implementing GUIs. From the patent, "The invention disclosed broadly relates to graphical user interfaces (GUI's) and particularly relates to the software architectures used to implement them."
However, all software patents have the problem of "creep", so that if a market emerges that looks within reach of the claims, the patent holder - if litigious - will try to expand the scope of the patent to claim this market. The claims of this patent, which are what really count, are written in fairly abstract language.
It is impossible to clear new software for patents - the cost would exceed $1bn - so we just have to try to stay away from known danger areas.
More constructively, we also support the fight against the software patent regime, at least in Europe.
When we wrote the OpenAMQ messaging software in 2005-6, we used a multithreading design that lets us pump around 100,000 500-byte messages per second through a server. This was for the AMQP project.
Today, we're making a new design - ØMQ, aka "Fastest. Messaging. Ever." - that is built from the ground up to take advantage of multiple cores. We don't need special programming languages, we use C++. The key is architecture, and especially an architecture that reduces the cost of inter-thread synchronization.
From one of the ØMQ whitepapers:
We don't get linear scaling on multiple cores, partly because the data is pumped out onto a single network interface, but we're able to saturate a 10Gb network. BTW ØMQ is GPLd so you can look at the code if you want to know how we do it.
Actually, the term "intellectual property" dates back to the French revolution (1790's) and the patent system. The older term used to be "exclusive privilege" and referred to the monopoly over a market that the sovereign would grant to his friends in business. After the revolution the French patent industry decided to rebrand itself and also began to discuss the idea of perpetual copyright.
Here is a description of this old debate.
A lot of things are going wrong for Microsoft right now...
- "Vista Ready" is starting to mean a huge liability
- The EU seems determined to make Microsoft stick to the rules
- MS's OOXML effort is running into real resistance
- Apple keeps taking more and more of the desktop and laptop market
- The EEE PC has finally turned Linux into a mainstream "feature"
- Trying to buy Yahoo has made MS look really weak in Internet services
- Its "we'll sue Linux for patent infringement" FUD is convincing no-one
- It's being sued persistently by patent trolls in the USA
I'm just wondering if 2008 will be the year that sees Microsoft humbled by the market and its own inability to deliver products people actually *want* to use.
A whole lot of people are going to sing and dance in the streets if things do go badly wrong for Microsoft. They don't have a lot of friends left, unless they're willing to buy them.
SOAP is not a competitive threat to Microsoft. And even if it was, the lack of litigation threats in SOAP means nothing more than "so far, so good", which is not proof of anything. You cannot prove that OSP is safe by pointing to the lack of issues in a non-controversial domain.
It appears that Microsoft has about 280 patents around OOXML and related technologies. It also has a large number of patents that read on ODF. We're making a list of these and hope to be able to publish them soon.
There are also several patents from third parties that read on OOXML, and in theory ISO should halt the process while these are examined and cleared. It looks like ISO won't do that.
Microsoft has several techniques to keep OOXML a captive standard controlled by a single vendor. Complexity is one. But patents are the very best technique.
Note also that OOXML's complexity is mostly because it's a dump of a legacy format. Some upcoming MS ISO proposals are very clean technically, but also very heavily patented.
It seems clear that the OSP is worthless for GPL implementations, the biggest threat to Microsoft.
At the same time it's worth noting that the format being voted on by ISO is not the format implemented by Office. There are over 2,300 changes and the two formats are not compatible. The reason for pushing for ISO standardisation is to let MS market their formats as "standard", while in fact implementing non-standard vendor-specific formats. And then, using patent threats against anyone who tries to reverse-engineer those.
It's a nice con trick. Many national bodies have realized what's going on but many are too corrupted or too ignorant to understand.
I have a MBA with SSD. The battery lasts 4-5 hours for normal work but some graphics-heavy work (like video or using coverflow for browsing) uses the CPU heavily and drains power faster. The SSD is silent and _very_ fast in some important places. E.g. startup of OpenOffice.org takes about 3 seconds in place of 15 seconds on my MacBook. It is a snappy machine. OS/X does not need the horsepower of Vista. The design is obviously minimalist, you need to appreciate "less is more" to like the MBA. The closest match for it is the Sony X505, which was also designed to be supermodel thin but which had a poorer build quality. My X505 was slightly warped, and died from some internal power failure, and was unrepairable. It cost 2-3 times what the MBA costs, and battery life was 1.5 hours max.
The MBA is a very beautiful machine, and part of the beauty is the minimalism. The machine is also elegantly designed, the aluminium casing feels tough and smooth. It's almost instant on, after a sleep, and the keyboard backlighting is very useful.
Overall, I much prefer working on the MBA than my MacBook, and the only thing I can seriously say is missing from the MBA, or wrong with it, is that I can't (yet) run Kubuntu from USB.
I put a fuller review of the MBA here.
Will it blend?
Not that I distrust Sun's motives when it comes to free software. I mean they did a stellar job on OpenOffice.org, didn't they?
It would be really interesting to know what percentage of computer users share files...? In my informal surveys, the figure is really high, 80-90%, and the people who do not share files don't do it simply because they don't care, or don't know how.
I have never, once, found someone who actually states that they have a moral principle against it.
The whole "piracy is theft" campaign seems as empty as the "don't smoke pot" campaign. People will do it, and just find ways of not getting caught.
Not a troll... since the EEE showed the way, when I see a nice ultraportable I have to ask whether it will run a slim, fast, and low-cost Linux, or whether I'll be forced to install Windows. Having killed my last Windows box a couple of years back, having a choice of operating systems (RedHat, Ubuntu, Kubuntu,... :-) is now my number 1 criteria when buying a portable.
Trade secrets are very hard to keep in any case. There are a million ways that trade secrets leak out, most trivially by people taking a good look at the products in question. If a secret could be really kept, the person holding it would not seek a patent. There would be no point. Secrecy is a cheaper and more efficient protection for a market, if it's possible. The patent protects ideas that cannot be otherwise protected. So in fact you have it completely backwards: the patent system protects ideas that are otherwise unprotectable.
And since disclosing ideas before they are patented is harmful to getting a patent, the patent system actually discourages disclosure and promotes secrecy.
Society gets the worst possible deal - monopolies in exchange for ideas that would become public knowledge anyhow, and increased secrecy in areas where collaboration is needed for innovation.
It's not a sane system. It exists because of the logic of power and money and history, not economic logic.
Don't forget that the patent establishment has invested a huge amount of money and effort, over the last 150+ years, to promote a mythology to support its claims to perpetuate its system of exclusive privileges. The myths are deep and taken as real by many who should be more skeptical. I debunked the main myths on Free Software Magazine.
One of the big old myths is the "inventor" and "invention" myths. In fact, innovation is well understood (since the mid-1800's at least) to be a social effect, driven by market demand for new products and enabled by technological progress. Produce a new material in cheap enough quantities, and dozens of "inventors" will come up with similar new applications for it.
Of course there cases of lone inventors who work outside the rest of society - these are so rare they prove the general case that invention is the result of a social network. And this social network, which may be less obvious in some industries, is absolutely central to the innovation process in software, which is why the concept of software patents is to utterly bogus and corrupt.
Patents of all kinds are just a form of protectionist economics, along with trade barriers, subsidies, legislated monopolies, and so on. These work for those who can work the system, everyone else pays the cost.
Linux costs more than Windows.
Open standards are bad for the economy.
Software patents are good for the economy.
Microsoft is a nice company.
Windows Vista is more secure than Mac OS/X.
OOXML is better than ODF.
Buying votes is a good way to build new standards.
People remain with Windows because they like it.
Firefox is less secure than Internet Explorer.
They're not really people, anyway...
What few people realize is that patent law trumps competition law. This is one reason large technology firms are so pro-patent even when it creates huge risk for them. Collusion between firms that would be considered illegal cartel-forming, and result in 20-year prison sentences, becomes 100% legal when there is a single patent involved.
What is happening to Vonage is what happens to every aggressive competitor in a market dominated by incumbents and protected by patents. It does not matter how innovate a new firm is. It will, always, infringe on a basic patent somewhere, and end up in a war of attrition that the incumbent will usually win. The innovator has two choices: die, or sell out.
Patents do not drive innovation, not in software and not elsewhere except maybe, maybe in pharma. They promote the self interest of large business and of the patent industry, period.
Note that Microsoft's patent war on FOSS goes along exactly the same lines. Convicted monopolist pleads guilty (in the EU) and move toward a patent licensing business, blessed by the regulator, which allows it to destroy and/or buy up its real competition.
This is about the strongest argument against software patents. They are literally a tool used by cartels and monopolists to control or destroy their competition. It's amazing that after 150-200 years of this discussion, governments still don't realize what kind of damage they do.
Why be shy about saying it? Microsoft were behind the SCO suit, and they're behind this one too. Here's how it's going to go down.
This is most definitely not about software patents, it is about business method patents. This has no effect on software patents at all. It simply stops the patenting of mental processes that are vaguely assisted by technology. You can be certain that software patents - on designs, algorithms, procedures, whatever - are as strong before as after this ruling.
Am I the only one that finds it deeply ironic that this ruling came because an "inventor" (patent jargon for 'lawyer') tried to patent something that would affect other lawyers? The CAFC does not care a jot about engineers, programmers, designers. But it does really care about inventors, sorry, lawyers.
You're absolutely accurate. In fact this morning someone asked me "why does the site not have a photo of the kayaks?" and I answered, "because we used canoes, not kayaks, but we liked the sound of 'kayak' better. And, if I put up a photo, some smartass is going to point and say, 'dude, those are canoes, not kayaks'".
I just love being right on a rainy Brussels afternoon.
"by court order" from who? The decision announced today actually states that Microsoft must license its patents for a reasonable fee. There is no precedent except in cases of national emergency to impose mandatory licensing, and absolutely no precedent for a model that would allow FOSS competitors.
Even the USA, in WWI, had to push aircraft patent holders to create a patent pool, it could not impose mandatory licensing. This option is exceptionally rare, and the EU Commission exceptionally weak. It is exceedingly far-fetched to imagine some random court is going to make such an order.
The very mention of mandatory licensing (for free, to competitors like Samba) will unite the entire patent industry in a fervor of hate against those proposing it. No EU Commission I know is going to risk that.
You are wrong. Software patents are valid in most European countries, depending on how the claims are phrased. The UK is almost alone in rejecting 'pure' software patents. National courts are more skeptical than the EPA but Microsoft is working hard on a plan together with the EPA to remove patent litigation from these national courts and bring it to a central court that would be much mopre friendly to software patents.
Remember that Microsoft is aiming for 5-8 years in the future when it will finally have to pull out its heavy weapons. It is calculating and hoping that it will have a big portfolio of legal, enforceable software patents in Europe by then.
In the meantime many firms regularly go to court to enforce software patents, and win. Microsoft can easily, trivially, bankrupt any team or company simply by forcing them to start legal action.
So even if a patent is not finally upheld, it is a very powerful monopolistic tool. The only safe escape for FOSS is a regulated ban on software patents that invalidates all the EPA's (illegally granted) software patents.
Before we all rejoice, consider that (a) Microsoft can, and will appeal, delaying any verdict by another three years (b) the fines amount to about one month of net profits, (c) Microsoft is building a new franchise strategy based on software patents that makes this ruling irrelevant. I predict MSFT's share price will wobble and then climb as this sinks in.
It's very simple - you pay about USD$8 to distribute a print server, or you are violating MS's patents and liable to be sued.
The largest monopolist in history has faced down the largest economy in history, and won. It was the delay that mattered; during those six years, software patents have changed the rules. Patents trump anti-trust law (a cartel deal that would result in 20 years jail for the execs that signed it becomes legal when a single patent is added to the mix). Microsoft is using this to trump whatever the EU does.
We are very close to seeing the FOSS world split into two, one half owned by Microsoft and acting as a franchisee, and the other half operating in increasing 'illegality'. The only real competition to Microsoft's global monopoly in one of the most vital of industries is the FOSS economy, and it's the patent threat that the EU should have been looking at, not the out-of-date issue of documentation and bundling.
Please consider joining the global fight against software patents - join the FFII, start a national chapter, and get involved. Only the community is able to defend itself against Microsoft, our politicians and courts are totally out-manoevered.
This decision was only for the U.S. and it's not over there. Look carefully at the comments by those who voted, and you'll see there is room for changes. Look at Lexmark's comment...
It's very important to understand that the OOXML fight is not over. Microsoft are doing a fantastic job of explaining to committees why this format deserves to be an international standard, and of ensuring no-one gets onto the committees who can raise this dreamy proposition.
We are looking at a lot of votes between now and end-August, across the world, and it's still not too late to submit comments to - for example - the Australian Standards Authority, which will almost certainly vote YES to OOXML.
On NoOOXML.org the FFII is coordinating the fight. If you've not signed the petition, please do so.