HanselMinutes on 9 - #2 - Weapons and Debugging the .NET Runtime

I hope I'm not the only one that finds that pile of patent cubes disturbing.

Richard.Hein wrote:

Ok, I'll bite ... the only reason I find it disturbing is because it's necessary.  Here's why.  Microsoft, Apple, Xerox, IBM, and every other big company has a lot of intellectual property that everyone kinda agreed to share/steal from one another, until one decided to sue the other, then all hell broke loose.  Now everyone has to file and try to obtain patents on software to protect themselves from being sued by other companies, someday.  It's like the cold war but everyone thinks they have to stockpile patents; like the cold war there are major incidents like SCO that threaten to turn many companies and maybe the internet itself to ashes, but are defeated ... the drama! 

That's the story that's usually trotted out to defend Microsoft's filing for software patents when it is supposedly against them on principle, but it doesn't really wash. Having a big arsenal of patents didn't help Microsoft defend against Eolas or the mp3 suit. The horse-trading of patent rights does go on, but it is not actually a defense because your oppoenent has no obligation to deal. The only thing that can get Microsoft off the hook in the Eolas case is someone else's patent as an example of prior art not ackowleged on the 'plug in' patent and in the case of the mp3 suit, a technicality of patent law itself.

Clearly having your employees file for patents, as long as it doesn't distract too much from development, is good business because those patents can become very valuable when a horse-trading opportunity occurs. However, they do not for any such thing as a defense - they are more of an investment really.

Richard.Hein wrote:


MS has paid out so much money on patents, but a lot - think the Fraunhofer license mess up - of it is frivolous.  If they were so concerned about the patent, as a weapon, then why dies MS get patents on the CLR, but publish the CLI as a standard ... so there is that recognition to the world that "this knowledge has to be shared, but you should have to do some work or pay us if you can't figure it out from the specifications yourself".

Alright, I'm just talking....

That's the odd thing - Microsoft publishes specs for the CLR as a standard, but then patents several of the mechanisms employed in their implementation. Why is that? OK, I already said that the patents form an investment or sorts, but isn't it a bit strange that microsoft publishes the specs for a system - one that it provides an implementation of and which isn't intended to be multi-platform and so there's really no need for anyone else to re-implement it - and by doing so, baits other developers to infringe patents that it has filed for? Possibly Microsoft has no itention of using those patents to squash independently developed CLR implementations, but there is no guarantee of that.

What I find disturbing about the patent cubes in particular is that in creating a nice little reward for it's employees, it's also unwittingly created a sinister symbol of what a software patent actually is. I see each one of those cubes as a prison cell for the idea that the particular patent covers. Some smart employee had a great idea for something and now it's locked up in a box so that nobody can use that idea without Microsoft's permission. I'd actually be gutted to have one of those cubes because it would mean that an idea I came up with was now locked up and nobody else, no other company or individual, could make use of that idea even if they had a better use for it than I did.