Monthly Archives: October 2010

Kitty Hawk 2.0

One of my favorite quotes from a great video titled “The Future of Money”:http://vimeo.com/16025167.

bq. “The Wright brothers weren’t thinking about all the infrastructure required to make commercial aviation happen, they were thinking ‘How do we make this thing fly?'”

It’s easy to look back over the industrial revolution and believe that somehow, this time things are different. Then you hear someone say something like this, and you realize that we’re all standing around Kitty Hawk, just trying to get this thing off the ground. The truly great things are yet to come.

The new patent troll economy

bq. “Microsoft pays patent fees; film at eleven”:http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/10/08/microsoft_patents_acacia/

Normally, this story wouldn’t even be news — patent deals are cut all the time — but there’s an obvious strategy being developed here. Microsoft has identified patents as the most effective attack against anyone seeking to profit from FOSS. Rather than attack FOSS directly, you dump as much money as you can in to littering the intellectual property space for a given product with patent mines. Step on a patent mine and all of the sudden you’re paying Microsoft (or someone else) for sitting on their ass and building a patent portfolio rather than innovating with any real products.

Under the old rules of engagement, patents were the equivalent of nuclear warheads. No one really wanted to use them, but they were good for making sure that your buddies across the street didn’t fire off a salvo of patent suits in your direction. The problem for FOSS is that software patents are ideologically reprehensible to most of the people involved, therefore patents are not sought, and the intellectual property battlefield falls in to the hands of the patent trolls and big corporations.

As things stand today, we’re looking at a future where patents become a large market in and of themselves. Big corporations will push for international cooperation for patent enforcement, and up-and-coming companies who benefit from FOSS are going to face significant new risks. The biggest losers will be consumers. Virtually all of the new internet giants stand on the shoulders of FOSS. It’s only matter of time before the patent trolls find ways to attack everyone using their “IP”.