Practical Technology

For years, decades, the big companies didn’t tend to wage patent wars on each other. The reason is simple. Major patent holders don’t tend to target other major patent holders because of MAD (mutually assured destruction). Or, in other words, if you sue me, I sue you, and we can both burn potentially hundreds of millions per year in legal costs just to conduct a business fight. Well that was the case until Oracle went after Google and now Allen is suing the world.

OK, well maybe not the world, but his company, Interval Licensing, is suing AOL, Apple, eBay, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, Yahoo and YouTube for violating one or more of four patents. These patents are Patent No. 6,263,507, for “Browser for Use in Navigating a Body of Information, With Particular Application to Browsing Information Represented ;” Patent No. 6,034,652, for “Attention Manager for Occupying the Peripheral Attention of a Person in the Vicinity of a Display Device;” Patent No. 6,788,314, for “Attention Manager for Occupying the Peripheral Attention of a Person in the Vicinity of a Display Device;” and Patent No. 6,757,682, for “Alerting Users to Items of Current Interest.”

David Postman, a spokesman for Allen, said that Interval Research was a “groundbreaking contributor” to the development of the commercial Internet and that the patents are fundamental to the ways leading e-commerce and search companies continue to operate.” I say this is nonsense.

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Novell’s history has been full of ups and downs. Once, with NetWare, it was the networking operating system powerhouse. Then they tried to be a consulting company. More recently, Novell has been both a Linux company and a friend to Microsoft.

VMware has long been the go-to business virtualization company. But now everyone is in the virtualization business. I think VMware should look into providing more of a complete software stack by buying its new best buddy, Novell.

Novell has certainly been looking for a buyer. While the company still has almost a billion in the bank, it’s not been doing that well in the market. Red Hat, not Novell, is still the big-time business Linux company. Novell is important — the company is especially strong in IBM’s mainframe Linux space. But as the last Novell earnings report showed, it’s still not doing as well as its shareholders would like.

On the other hand, VMware has been doing quite well. But I continue to wonder just how long VMware can withstand the pressure from so many competitors. There’s Microsoft with Hyper-V, Red Hat with KVM, Citrix with Xen, and Oracle with VirtualBox and Oracle VM. Even if VMware’s software is worlds better than the competition — and I don’t think it is — everyone else is offering virtualization for free or as part of a bundle.

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What do the programmers and companies that depend on the Java software family make of Oracle suing Google? To find out, we asked them.

The lawyers and analysts all see potential trouble ahead for Java developers and ISVs coming from Oracle suing Google, but what do they think? I looked around the Web and asked several of them for their thoughts on what Oracle/Google will mean for Java and their own work.

Charles Nutter, a JRuby developer, whose also a former Sun Java developer, recently wrote in Dzone, the popular programmer site, that the “collection of patents specified by the suit seems pretty laughable to me. If I were Google, I wouldn’t be particularly worried about showing prior art for the patents in question or demonstrating how Android/Dalvik don’t actually violate them.”

But, as Nutter noted, no matter the lawsuit’s result, “It’s obviously not great to have two Java heavyweights bickering like schoolchildren, and it would be positively devastating if Android were obliterated because of this. But I think the real damage will be in how the developer community perceives Java, rather than in any lasting impact on the platform itself.”

He also believes that “Nothing in this suit would apply to any of the three mainstream Java Virtual Machines (JVM) that 99% of the world’s Java runs on. Hotspot and Jrockit are both owned by Oracle, and J9 [one of IBM's Java implementations] is subject to the Java specification’s patent grant for compliant implementations. … And so 99% of the world’s use of Java is in the clear.” At the same time though, Nutter conceded that “This certainly does some damage to the notion of open-source Java implementations, but only those that are not (or can not be) compliant with the specification.” And, that isn’t at all easy to do.

Still, Nutter thinks that whether you’re a Java or an Android developer, you shouldn’t “lose sleep over this.”

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We all use PHP in our enterprises. It’s become the do-it-all language of choice for Web developers, from the smallest companies to the Fortune 500 and back again. However, PHP — which has been called “the one programming language that makes German look terse” — has problems with scalability. It is all too easy to write sloppy code that never-the-less works well enough to be rolled out.

Of course, as Luke Welling, Web Team Lead at Message Systems, a digital messaging management company and co-author of the “Bible” of commercial PHP/MySQL programming, PHP and MySQL Web Development, pointed out at an OSCON seminar in Portland, OR, that’s true of many corporate programming projects.

So what can you, as IT management, do about this? Well, for starters, Welling suggested that managers fight the attitude that sloppy programming is acceptable because IT can always “throw more and faster processors” at any performance problem. Sometimes, you can’t fix performance problems with hardware. You need to convince developers and their team leaders that writing to the minimum hardware requirements, rather than the maximum, is the smart thing to do.

You also need to fight the common programmer perception that all production code is temporary. This starts with the basics. Welling observed that many developers don’t even believe that the language or dialect they’re writing in is still going to be used in production systems in a few years. Wrong! According to Welling, the idea that “PHP code is going to hang around is not a crazy idea. Programming languages hang around for a very long time, as the COBOL programmers who were pulled out of retirement to deal with the Year 2000 bug found out.”

More specifically, you must convince programmers and their team leads that “No, the code you dash off today won’t be replaced properly next year. Unless the code causes real issues today there will never be time to replace it in the future.” Welling believes that “Inertia is powerful, platform changes are harder, rewrites are harder still, and people get stuck in their ways.” So encourage developers to get it right, or righter anyway, the first time.

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You may think that the last thing on earth that could happen to your company would be that your business might be sued because it used a particular software program. You’d be wrong.

In the aftermath of the Bilski Supreme Court decision, the Supreme Court did nothing to stop software or business method patents. As a result, not only software development companies but all businesses are now in more danger from patent lawsuits than ever before.

That’s because as Keith Bergelt CEO of the Open Invention Network (OIN), a non-profit, patent-protection consortium, observed, “Patent lawsuits have been doubling for the last three to five years, and I expect this trend to contribute.”

In particular, you can expect to see more attacks from patent trolls, companies that exist for the sole purpose of extorting money from businesses by threatening them with lengthy and expensive litigation. Bergelt estimated that win, lose, or draw, it costs $3- to $5-million dollars to defend against a patent lawsuit.

Ouch!

According to Bergelt, the reason why patent trolls will bring more lawsuits to large enterprises, rather against a business rival, is that these companies can make money from patent lawsuits. Bergelt said that a great deal of capital is out there now and that “People are spending billions to acquire patents, largely software patents. Their business strategy is to sue the Linux distributions and their 20-25 biggest customers.”

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