In a blog post, Sun's Jonathan Schwartz has announced that Sun will counter-sue Net App, after negotiations proved to be fruitless. "So now it looks like we can't avoid responding to their litigation, as frustrated as I am by that (as I said, we have zero interest in suing them). I wanted to outline our response (even if it tips off the folks at Net App), and for everyone to know where we're headed. First, the basics. Sun indemnifies all its customers against IP claims like this. [...] Second, Sun protects the communities using our technologies under free software licenses. [...] Third, we file patents defensively."
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Member since:2005-08-12
I'm not sure why you consider "independent discovery" to be so important. Technology has always been a race. Everyone can't win.
It also doesn't matter how much, or how little has been spent on the invention, it's the results that matter.
My only real objection to the way software patents are handled is that they are too long. I feel as though they should be for a profitable, but shorter time. How long is something that needs to be decided, but I would think that between 5 and 8 years would be about right.
Member since:2007-10-25
Yes, technology has indeed always been a race. And whoever discovers it first will always have the lead in getting the finished product out to market, without any IP protection whatsoever, assuming they're remotely competent in the production side of things.
The main issue that I see is why should someone be granted an exclusive right to the technology just because they happened to discover it first? I can see legit arguments as to why others shouldn't be able to copy, but I can't think of one good reason why somebody who discovers it without any reference to (or, indeed, knowledge of in many cases) the first discoverer, should owe the first discoverer a cent. There is no connection between the two discoverers.
Member since:2006-04-22
Say Sun develops a method to transmit data over the electrical grid at amazing speeds. They do not patent the technology, then another company steps in, uses this technology and is the first out the door with some new device.
The reality that has existed for so many years is that companies enter into agreements and cross-patent deals. This has been going on since for decades. While many were whining and crying about the Microsoft-Novell deal, my first reaction was...so? In fact many technologies and IT related inventions you use on a daily basis exist from company A, because they licensed it from company B.
I do agree though that it is unique that software is able to have both copyright and patent, but then again software is unique in of itself when compared to books or steel girders. The one aspect that I took from the recent EU vs. Microsoft issue was that governments, societies, business, and the legal system are still working out how to understand and deal with technology.
Put another way, if I develop a new CODEC that allows for HD quality over the internet, not only do I want to copyright the CODEC, but a patent to the technology itself. Otherwise, any other company would simply reverse engineer, alter, and then produce in capabilities I do not have. But, with the code patented, any companies would have to come to an agreement. Yes I understand that maybe they may possibly have come up with something similar, but in the end, as melgross points out, this is how the business world works. Otherwise what is to stop other companies from just sitting around and waiting for me to publish so they can basically take my ideas? So while the company may lose out on being first to the market, they do have the option of always agreeing to terms.
Fact of the matter is, companies today are simply not going to invest the time and money without insuring that their investment is protected. While it is a nice fantasy that we could just do without all patents, copyrights, etc..fact is developers need to get paid, and companies simply do not pay salaries with no return.
The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.
PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.
Member since:
2007-10-25
You two completely miss the point about what's bad about software patents (and technology patents in general). They do not prevent copying like copyrights do (for an insane amount of time), they prevent independent rediscovery of the same thing. So if Company A invests $100 million and finishes inventing a new way to wax widgets a week before Company B (who also invested $100 million), then Company B is out of luck. The thought is that it encourages companies to publish the patent rather than locking it up as a trade secret, but most such patents, in the software field at least, are merely natural evolutions of the field, so that reason flies out the window and makes it hard for anybody to avoid accidentally avoid stepping on a patent. Which lasts for 20 years (not counting sneaky ways to extend it thanks to bad USPTO rules), which in the technology field means that the patent is useless once it's no longer protected. Unlike in most other fields that do not change nearly as rapidly.
If patents worked like copyrights and did not protect against others independently coming up with the same thing, a lot fewer people would be complaining. Not to mention that software is one of the only things that can be covered by both patent and copyright. Why should software be more locked up than both books (copyright-only) and steel girder production (patent-only)?