Comments on: Open source: The new patent regime

Open source has a way of making the intellectual property regime much more efficient, and much less complacent.

[parasubvert]

I generally agree with this, though I think two years is a bit optimistic for an open source commoditization effect. It's like 5 to 7 years in my experience -- though I'm talking about production usage , stable codebase, paid support , etc. , not just early adoption and hacking.

The risk is that this can be turned around: proprietary patents can be filed and used against open implementations unless they offer an olive branch patent license. I can see this happening in niche areas where proprietary license fees will be high and make up for the patent troll stigma.

[the_redistributor]

Yes, but what about the issue of prior art? Couldn't the open source version of the software be used as an argument by the patent attorney that it's not an original design concept? Just guessing here.

[Penguinisto]

It ain't just "yesterday" that Open Source is good at driving... almost all of the eye-candy and gee-whiz things that MSFT and Apple have added to their repetroires have come straight out of open-source projects: tabbed browsing, widgets (Vista puts its collection of them a "sidebar"), 3D desktop effects, journaling filesystems, and a list of things that would take way too much space to list in its entirety.

[mbenedict]

3D desktop effects did not come from open-source. For example, SGI (Irix) had 3D desktop effects long before any open-source implementation, primarily because 3D hardware was very expensive back then, and was generally only available on high-end graphical workstations. Now that I think about it, even hardware 2D support was rare in the open-source world back then (I remember needing to buy commercial XWindow servers for FreeBSD to get 2D acceleration).

Commercial journaling filesystems also long predated open-sourced ones. IBM's JFS had its full production release in 1990 as part of AIX. Veritas came out around the same time.

Open-source journaling filesystems weren't available until 10 years later. According to Wikipedia both ext3 and ReiserFS were introduced in 2001. But by then, every major commercial OS already had journaling (Solaris, AIX, HPUX, Digital, Irix, etc). Even Windows already transitioned to a journaled NTFS by then (with NTFS v3, introduced in 2000).

There were even earlier incarnations of journaling file systems in the commercial world, such as Xerox's Cedar FS which had journaling since the late 1980s, but these were more research-oriented than production-ready systems.

[Penguinisto]

Granted on Irix and JFS (forgot all about them...) but you still have to admit that there were many innovations taht came straight out of OSS.