Friday, November 24, 2006

Patents

Today Slashdot has a story on LSI patenting multiply linked lists. The patent was applied for in 2002 and granted in April this year.

I'm glad to see lots of comments on Slashdot referring to prior art. A decent lawyer could avoid the question of doubly linked lists, so I was pleased to see more complex examples from the 80's and 90's.

I was particularly bothered by this patent due to the fact that I would have inadvertantly violated it several years ago. My blog describes an RDF DB design with takes advantage of multiple links for each node in a list, so that the lists can be traversed in completely different directions. Unfortunately the posts were made in May 2004, which was well after the submission date of the patent (2002). So my work doesn't qualify as prior art.

You'd think that my own work (among others) constitutes the breaking of the "non-obvious" requirement. Apparently not. There must be a whole swathe of the software developers community who may be classified as "brilliant geniuses" by the USPTO, given that we all come up with the same non-obvious idea.

When learning programming, we are all inculcated with standard techniques. We are taught to not reinvent the wheel. Design patterns, algorithms, you name it... the state of the art in programming is to take someone else's system and build on it. Make it something new by connecting old things in new ways, or adding into existing systems. We are NOT taught which techniques to avoid due to patent problems. We are not taught how to search for possible conflicts with existing patents. In fact, the whole point of modern programming is an anathema to what patents try to enforce. So it can be really frustrating to see patents on common ideas. It can be even more frustrating when someone decides to patent something that you've worked with. I guess I should be grateful that I needed a more scalable design than the one described in that blog post.

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Mashups

I like seeing the tools we write being used in the real world. After all, what is the point otherwise? We are trying to create something useful, so it has to be applicable to use-cases that people really want. While my own specialty is Mulgara, this is just a tool for the semantic web. So I'm interested to see these use-cases, regardless of the underlying engine.

With this in mind, I enjoyed reading a post from Danny Ayers today. He describes using various data sources to solve a useful real-world query that he got from yet another source, to wit:
"Where can I buy firewood as a function of price and distance from where I am now?"

While I agree with Danny about the ability to put all of this together, I think he is a little optimistic about the effort to do so:
"... all the tech to answer the question on the Web is readily available as almost-commodity tools, not a lot of effort needed."

It would be nice to think that he is right, but I'm skeptical. Maybe I'm overestimating the effort. After all, I'm still a beginner at programming Ruby. :-)

My favorite line was last:
"Why would anyone put such data on the Web? Perhaps they might want to sell their wood."


BTW, of all the words in the US spelling system, the one that bothers me the most is "favorite". It just looks wrong somehow. Why this word bothers me more than "color", "optimize", or "bank check" is something I can't answer. :-)

Lament for Open Source Work

I miss those heady days of working on open source code 90-100% of the time. In those days I could talk about work as much as I wanted, with no ramifications. In fact, discussing my work on Kowari was a good thing.

I initially started blogging about my work simply so others in my team could find out what I was doing. If they didn't have time, then they didn't have to read it, but if they were interested then it was all there for them to read. I quickly found that organizing (there's that American spelling again) my thoughts sufficiently to write about them helped me to keep track of what I was doing, and to plan for up coming work.

Somewhat surprisingly (for me), it didn't take long before people I didn't know started to read my blog as well. This was an interesting experience, and led to some interesting conversations and contacts. Ultimately it helped me get my current job!

Unfortunately, my work now is almost exclusively commercial. That means I can't write about it in public. I've also found that I like blogging too much to write about it privately (even in the local Wiki at my company).

I can still write about Mulgara outside of working hours, but then I run into a new problem. Back in the day, I was able to work on Kowari (now Mulgara) during the day, and blog about it at night. These days I work on "other things" during the day, and at night I can either blog, or I can work on Mulgara. It's hard to find the time to do both. It's a little frustrating.

Actually, most of the technical things I've been writing about have been in the Mulgara Wiki, and not in this blog at all. So at least I've written something, but it's disappointing to think that I've lost most of my audience (small as it was). The emails and comments I received were often insightful, very useful, and quite gratifying.

With all that audience missing, who am I writing for today? Well, mostly myself... just like it was in the beginning. I suppose I'll also be read by those people who forgot I was in their RSS feeds (hello to both of you!). :-)

Recently I've noticed that I miss the process of writing. I guess I'll have a flurry of activity in this blog for a little while, until I get overwhelmed with other things again. Hopefully it will be fun while it lasts!