Just how valuable are the Linux-related patents that Microsoft recently sold?
The Open Invention Network (OIN), a patent defense coalition for Linux whose members include IBM and Red Hat, trumpeted the news that it had bought 22 Linux-related patents from Allied Security Trust (AST) in a bid to protect Linux. Microsoft, which sold the patents to AST, claims the patents "weren't important," as noted in The Wall Street Journal.
Did the OIN get value or garbage?
Microsoft has long presented itself as the looming patent threat to Linux, once claiming that 235 of its patents are violated by Linux. But the AST patents, which cover 3D graphics, are apparently not among that group of core Microsoft patents allegedly violated by Linux.
If Microsoft didn't care about the patents, why should OIN?
It's a question ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley is asking, and rightly so. As CNET's Ina Fried notes, it's possible that Microsoft was looking to offload the patents to a patent troll, one that could litigate against Linux by proxy. This same strategy is apparently being used by Intellectual Ventures, a patent-holding (and trolling) firm that may be selling patents to litigious buyers to generate revenue.
OIN CEO Keith Bergelt speculates as much, insinuating that Microsoft may have "had ulterior motives" in selling to AST, a firm that has a "catch and release" policy that would see the Linux-related patents pushed back onto the open market after a year, and potentially fall into the hands of a patent troll, as eWeek reports,
But this seems like a rather klugey way for Microsoft to go after Linux. If it wanted to ensure the patents made it into the right (or wrong, depending on your point of view) hands, it could have sold the patents directly to a Microsoft-friendly patent troll. The fact that OIN wasn't allowed to directly participate in Microsoft's patent auction says little about the company's ultimate (and allegedly "ulterior") motives.
Faith is great in religion--it's not a viable business strategy.
I'm left wondering just how much protection OIN scored for Linux with the purchase of these 22 3D graphics patents. If the patents were core to Microsoft, it wouldn't have sold them for simply the off-chance that the patents might eventually find their way to a litigious patent troll. Microsoft tends to be more direct with its anti-Linux message, a fact borne out by its recent scurrilous Best Buy training FUD.
I suspect that the patents truly weren't very important to Microsoft. This doesn't mean their value to OIN is diminished, but it's probably not time to uncork the champagne at the "coup" scored at the local patent yard sale.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Neil McAllister in Washingtonpost.com suggests a difficult question: will Google and Microsoft own the web? It's a question stemming from Mozilla CEO John Lilly's concern that Google's entrance into the browser market has "complicated" its once-sweet relationship with open-source Firefox, and by Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz's concern that Google and Microsoft's rising power on the Web has made the browser "hostile territory" for Web application developers.
The new world is starting to look a lot like the old world.
I suggested the other day that Google is beginning to look at a lot more like Microsoft, but that its commitment to openness may trump its desire to control.
Reading McAllister's post, and re-reading mine, I'm not so sure I was right.
The history of computing has generally moved from open to closed. Software was initially open until vendors saw profit in it, then they closed it off. The Web was born in open protocols, but as profit exists in proprietary hooks and overlays (like Google), we'll probably find ways to close it off, too. Indeed, Google's request for a fast-lane for its bits on the Web is probably just the first big step in that direction.
Can the Web remain free? I hope so, but history is not in its favor. It will only be if greater profits exist in openness than in proprietary that it has a chance. Perhaps Google believes this. It certainly says that it believes this. But the proof will be in its behavior over the next few years.
The more Google grows, the more it becomes a cause for concern for many people--and not simply its competitors. But should it?
On the one hand, Google has become a privacy bogeyman, dropping off the list of the top 20 companies trusted with customer privacy. Ironically, this has come at the same time that Google has upped its commitment to open data policies, which enable users to control their own data privacy policies. Are users suggesting that they can't trust themselves?
This abandonment of trust in Google also comes in the face of an ever-growing commitment within Google to open source. Google now hosts more than 200 open-source projects, ranging from the more obscure (Protocol Buffers) to the well-known (Chrome browser, Web Toolkit).
Perhaps the drop in trust derives from Google's refusal to stay in its search sandbox, expanding its reach well beyond the search engine to mobile, for example, with a range of new features planned for the Android mobile open-source platform.
But why the lack of trust? The more Google has expanded its appetite for influence and dominance of the Web, it has has circumscribed its ability to control through open data, open source, and open APIs. As Google hasn't always had a policy of openness, I'm increasingly impressed by the search giant's widening commitment to it, even as it has the potential to seriously close off the Web to competitors' and, ultimately, customers' detriment.
Is Google perfect? No. But it is also not a 1990s Microsoft-style monopoly. Many of us begrudged Microsoft its dominance because it has been protected through things such as proprietary file formats and (past) illegal tying arrangements. Google does not compete this way. It competes in the open.
Have we lost trust in Google simply because it is winning, and we innately suspect the worst of a company at its scale?
Microsoft has news for those who hold to the "Six degrees of Kevin Bacon" theory. We are linked with everyone else on the planet by 6.6 degrees of separation, not six.
Researchers at Microsoft studied records of 30 billion electronic conversations among 180 million people in various countries....This was 'the first time a planetary-scale social network has been available,' they observed. The database covered all the Microsoft Messenger instant-messaging network in June 2006, equivalent to roughly half the world's instant-messaging traffic at that time.
It's a nice corroboration of the "six degrees" theory, but I actually find the data used much more interesting. What would you do with 30 billion electronic conversations?
What would I do? I'd use that data, and other such data from Facebook and other social networks, to describe my social graph and thereby provide trusted commercial connections with others. Knowing my connection to that person on the other side of an eBay purchase? Priceless. I suspect we'd act very different online if we knew how closely we're actually connected to that hitherto anonymous buyer or seller.
Trust is the currency of any viable economy. Whoever can figure out how to corral the data behind our respective social graphs and turn it to commercial use will be the next billion-dollar business. Hint: It starts with the address book.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Ericsson, Verizon, and others are joining together to buy up patents to prevent the patents being used against them by patent trolls. The group, called the Allied Security Trust, is a bit like the open-source friendly Open Invention Network, but appears to have more cash at its disposal.
The new Allied Security Trust aims to buy patents that others might use to bring infringement claims against its members. Companies will pay roughly $250,000 to join the group and will each put about $5 million into escrow with the organization, to go toward future patent purchases, the people familiar with the initiative said....[C]ompanies in the new group will sell the patents they acquire after they have granted themselves a nonexclusive license to the underlying technology.
Allied Security Trust isn't intended to be a revenue generator for the companies involved, but rather a protective shield against patent trolls big (Intellectual Ventures, which was recently torched in The New Yorker) and small (Acacia).
Will it succeed? Who knows? But any efforts intended to bring some sanity to the patent-litigation racket are very welcome.
The web offers businesses almost unlimited commercial potential. The primary thing limiting that potential, however, is trust (or, rather, a lack of it). How do I do business with a stranger online? eBay has come up with its own answer, but it hasn't worked out as well as hoped, as Nick Carr notes:
By providing buyers and sellers with a simple means for rating one another, eBay has been able, we've been told, to avoid lots of rules and regulations and other top-down controls. The community, built on trust and fellow-feeling, essentially manages itself. Tom Friedman, in his book The World Is Flat, voiced the common opinion when he called eBay a "self-governing nation-state."
Nice story. Too bad it didn't work out.
The reason is self-interest, which doesn't always mesh well with other-interest. This is absolutely a problem with impersonal systems like eBay. It is not, however, a problem with true social networks (which map one's social graph, rather than promiscuously adding "friends" Facebook-style).
... Read moreTechCrunch reports this morning that the dream of integrating one's true social network (as revealed through email) with one's psuedo-social networks (as revealed through mad "friend-getting" on Facebook) may soon be realized. UK-based Techlightenment has quietly been developing its Socialistics program, which aims to bring intelligence to social networks:
But now they are developing the technology behind Socialistics to act as the basis on which to build other applications, and not just Facebook or OpenSocial versions. They started off with FriendVox recently, a VOIP client for Facebook, and are now working in stealth mode on an application to analyse your Gmail, Outlook, Thunderbird email, in fact any POP3 or IMAP email account....
Eventually Techlightenment is planning for Socialists to be extended from analysing your email and social networks to gathering information about your daily workflow, IM and even phone conversations. Think a tag-cloud of your life, complete with graphs and sliders.
All of which is great, but I still think it misses out on the truly interesting things to do with that data. I already know who my friends are. Socialistics presumably makes that apparent with tag clouds and what-not. But that's a superficial and not-so-interesting use of the data.
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