Dyrathror

I am Software Developer and my opinion is that Software Patents are not only Nonsense but also counterproductive!

There are not infinitely many ways to program something. Computer Science Theory already shows that for many problems there are only few methods to solve the problem with programming in a reasonable way if they are solvable at all. And then there are best practices in programming which simply evolved from many programmers coding a huge amount of code and trying to make everything more manageable.

On the other hand there are the software companies who try to claim every idea as theirs to gain control over their competitors or even a part of the software development universe. This turns programming more and more into a run through a minefield and I am already sure that one day when I finally think that I get a big success with one of my programs there comes one of these big patent hoarders and wants its part of my cake because I violated some sort of broad spread patent.

As I can read on Heise Online today this time someone tries to get his piece of cake from our dear competitor Microsoft. It seems that the Canadian company i4i holds a US Patent No. 5,787,449 which describes the separate manipulation of architecture information and data of a document within the same file.

Not that I am not a little bit mischievous that it hit Microsoft, one of the biggest supporters of software patents and rigorous enforcer of his own “rights”, but I have to state that I am a little bit astonished that such a patent is possible after all! I mean, the patent was filed in 1994 but at this time we had already the Java Programming language since 1992. And together with this language came the famous JAR-file which is an zip-archive enhanced with a metadata file. This metadata file describes the “architecture” of the jar-archive and can be manipulated independently from the class files which normally constitute the data. It becomes even more obvious that this method is common sense when you examine the usage of ear- or war-archives because with the appearance of J2EE the usage of XML-Files within the archive for configuration and architecture description of the data within the archive went a huge step further.

Since 2006 the Open Document Standard is specified, which actually does what every smart programmer would do without any guidance. It packs together the formatting information and the data of a document into one archive, the exact same path which was already prepared by the jar-archives.

So, especially in direction of Microsoft, I would like to ask: Does anybody else have the same impression as I that software patents are really counterproductive an therefore should be forbidden?

I for myself have never in this business seen a striking innovation where I would have agreed that this should be protected by a patent. But I am only about 20 years in this business. Perhaps this point is still to come.

I didn’t write anything for quite a while. But now I am back

My break had two reasons. The really good one is that I became father of a little daughter named Thalea in the mid of July. Naturally I hope for the next talent in computer science but who knows. If she is only a little bit like her mother she will absolutely have her own head and push her own ideas!

If you hope that I will publish family pictures regularly now I have to disappoint you. Family business stays private. The next public pictures of Thalea you can see perhaps in her own blog one day.

The second reason for not publishing articles was the deceasing of my beloved IBM Thinkpad Tablet. I think the heat and moisture of Hainan have been too much for it and when the fan finally gave up …

As a more suitable solution for the Hainan weather conditions I bought a desktop computer with many fans and installed Linux in form of the Fedora 11 distro on it. Perhaps installed is said too much. After over a week of installation I am still struggling to get all components supported and fully up and running. Hope that one day I manage to have installed this cool machine as it should be, including accelerated graphics and dolby surround sound.

Nevertheless I will try to revive the laptop. The tablet functionality is simply cool to manipulate images.