Licensing

Matt Aslett of The 451 Group and I met in London this morning, and discussed a range of issues. One thing that came up, which Aslett discusses on his blog, was the furor over CPAL, AGPL, and other open-source licensing designed for the Internet. I heavily contributed to that furor but, looking back, it would seem that the concerns were almost completely overblown.

Mea culpa.

A year and a half later, very few open-source projects use the CPAL license, which introduced a specific form of graphical attribution for open-source projects. There was sound around it, and there was fury, but … Read more

TechCrunch reports that LinkedIn just upgraded its people search, but fails to mention the technology behind the upgrade: Lucene, the open-source search project. Nor is LinkedIn alone: MySpace has also used Lucene to revamp its search functionality, as Ars Technica reported earlier in June.

Indeed, borrowing from open source is now standard operating procedure for Web companies. What is interesting in the use of Lucene is how the Web is branching beyond the familiar LAMP stack to build in technologies like Lucene, Yahoo!'s User Interface Library, and other open-source components.

Arguably, the Web could not exist without open-source software, … Read more

Though SCO still has the option to appeal, a federal district court judge Dale Kimball has now effectively written its death sentence in the form of a somewhat blistering final judgment (PDF), as Groklaw reports.

SCO, once the bane of the open-source world, is effectively dead. The company, which long ago stopped trying to make useful products and instead morphed into a boutique law firm, has seen its revenue slide into oblivion while Novell, which stood up to SCO and has now won in court, has seen its Linux revenue jump.

Lesson? You can only milk a weak intellectual property … Read more

Correction: The article inadvertently states that RPX has raised $40 million in venture capital funds. This is incorrect. A spokesperson contacted the author to note that a correct reading of the website would be that "The company has acquired more than $40 million in patent rights since its founding."

Patent trolls are the bane of existence for technology companies. Patent trolls buy up patents so that they can extort money from companies that actually build and sell products. The world's largest patent troll is arguably Intellectual Ventures, which holds billions of dollars worth of patents.

It is … Read more

For centuries people have enjoyed sandwiches, and many businesses have made them without the "critical" protection of patents to ensure a short-term monopoly.

Indeed, here in the United States, Domino's Pizza is making a furious push to up-end Subway's sandwich dominance.

!%!%!%!% pirates!

Have they forgotten that McDonald's filed for a patent on sandwich-making two years ago? The U.K.'s Guardian covered this momentous patent two years ago, but it apparently hasn't struck fear into these would-be sandwich maestros.

Of course, McDonald's was not simply trying to patent the sandwich. It was trying … Read more

I'm sick of patent lawsuits.

Earlier this week Spansion filed suit against Samsung for alleged patent violations in the latter's flash chips. On Thursday, Leader Technologies actually issued a press release announcing a lawsuit before it had even bothered to serve notice on Facebook, as Techdirt points out.

Is Leader playing to the judge or to the media?

From the press release:

Leader was founded by Michael McKibben in 1997 and is a pioneer in Web-based collaboration platforms. Leader has filed several patent applications, dating back to 2002, that cover its technology. "We have spent a great … Read more

WebXchange is suing Microsoft--or, rather, three of its customers--for allegedly infringing its patents in Microsoft Visual Studio, as CNET reports. Just desserts? Nah. Microsoft rarely sues anyone, preferring instead to threaten to sue.

Regardless, WebXchange's suit against Dell, FedEx, and Allstate for using Visual Studio is nuclear waste: by suing customers, WebXchange just made software licensing even uglier than it already was, making its own future business as difficult as it will become for Microsoft and every other vendor. Nice one, bozo. Suing customers--in this case--is always bad form and serves to hurt all players in the industry.

One … Read more

A Microsoft employee--Eric Brechner--has finally stated the obvious on patents: they're worthless in terms of providing "disclosure" for would-be infringers (or licensees). It would appear that they're also worthless in terms of helping licensors:

When using existing libraries, services, tools, and methods from outside Microsoft, we must be respectful of licenses, copyrights, and patents. Generally, you want to carefully research licenses and copyrights (your contact in Legal and Corporate Affairs can help), and never search, view, or speculate about patents. I was confused by this guidance till I wrote and reviewed one of my own patents. … Read more

I was talking on Wednesday with Daniel Tunkelang, chief scientist for Endeca, about potential competition his company faces from open source (e.g., Lucene). In response, Tunkelang made an exceptionally interesting point, which I summarize here:

Open source drives innovation by making yesterday's technology a commodity, forcing proprietary vendors to innovate in order to justify their paychecks.

This got me thinking. Patents are short-term monopolies (20 years) designed to give inventors sufficient time in which to recoup their R&D costs and turn a profit. Open source turns the 20-year patent term into two years, if that. As … Read more