Bugzappy's Blog

Yesterday on June 19 this made the news in the world of intellectual property:

President Obama Announces Intent to Nominate David Kappos as Patent and Trademark Director [1]

Kappos is IBM’s main intellectual property counsel, and he has been a strong advocate for open-source. One of his tasks at the United States Patents and Trademarks Office (USPTO) would be to make this dinosaur speedier. Which means you might at last be able to get a patent while it’s still relevant to your business.

More importantly, David Kappos has been a key guy implementing IBM’s latest patent strategy which goes by the following rules [2]:

• Patent applicants are responsible for the quality and clarity of their patent applications.

• Patent applications should be available for public examination.

• Patent ownership should be transparent and easily discernable.

• Pure business methods without technical merit should not be patentable.

These rules are more restrictive than US patent laws, especially the way that the USPTO currently enforces them, and we can imagine that Kappos is being chosen for the Patent Office in part because of this slant.

This comes at a time when an entire set of dubious patent-related practices are being methodically dismantled by the Supreme Court and the USPTO. [3], [4], [5] and [6].

Not least of which being the questionable practice of granting patents on “business methods”. [8]

All in all I like the whole trend. As much as it is incredibly easy to “invent” new software, right now it is inversely difficult to protect one’s inventions because of the huge expenses. Throwing $10,000 at your attorney doesn’t buy you much protection; $100,000 is more like it for a coherent set of patents worth building a business on, and that’s without the potential cost of litigation when Amazon takes notice. Even without seeking to aggressively protect your ideas, if you’re not a big player with a big patent portfolio, a big legal team and a big bank account, you still don’t dare invent and implement anything too ambitious for fear of getting sued. In this environment, to a small software developer, too much success equals danger.

A shift away from patents and toward open-source (and trade-secrets) will give smaller, more nimble inventors much better chances. And you just watch the impact it will have. Big companies will be busy productizing ideas, inventions, frameworks and other pieces of code small and big generated as much by their own engineers as by the rest of the community. Inventors will be able to get a return on their “ideas” not by patenting and licensing them, but by making specialized, high value-add products based on their own open-sourced ideas, without fear of unwittingly infringing IBM’s (or Amazon’s or Google’s) patents. Of course we all know the trend has been here for years (Linux, Apache..) but look for the next generation of web “inventions”, call it Web 3.0, to exist in a world very different from Web 2.0. A much friendlier world. And as a result, look for more disruptive technologies coming out of unforeseen places. Just like HTML and HTTP came out of…. the CERN!!?

Well that’s the future I am hoping for anyway, because I have a lot riding on it.

At our company we have been planning to use phonegap.com to develop on the iPhone, for 3 reasons: (1) makes use of languages we already know well, (2) should save us development time, and (3) should help us target applications to multiple mobile operating systems (iPhone, Android, Blackberry). 

However recently Apple has rejected a number of phonegap-based apps — see Mike Nachbaur’s blog — needless to say we are concerned, and the phonegap people (developers and users alike) are bordering on outraged, and certainly scared. Mike Nachbaur did the right thing and sent Apple a politely written open letter, which they acknolwegded but apparently have not responded to yet.

Ajaxian complained, and ReadWriteWeb offered some potential reasons for Apple to be rejecting phonegap apps. Not least of which being that Apple may want to make cross-platform development more difficult than it has to be.

To us at Logimake this may mean the following:

1. Because our time spent learning and developing for the iPhone will not easily benefit our strategy on other mobile platforms, we will have to spend more time right now on Android and Blackberry (using phonegap, perhaps), to compensate for the loss of synergy
2. Because it is still not clear yet whether the iPhone will become a serious player in the enterprise, that loss of synergy is making it doubly imperative to develop on a Blackberry-enabled platform like phonegap. 

Apple’s forte on the iPhone is in consumer apps, and it has lots to prove in enterprise apps — and integration. By keeping cross-platform frameworks, and hence applications, at bay, Apple may be reducing its own potential success in the enterprise.

We are eagerly waiting any news from Mike or Apple.

Today I got rid of Google Ads on this blog.

Since I started this blog a little over a month ago, it has had around 700 page views (not big by blogging standards, but still nice), 800 ad impressions, and 2 clicks. Those 2 clicks earned me very very close to $0, as close as you can possibly get and call it revenue (take a wild guess what that $ amount was). On top of it, these clicks happened on the very day I put the blog online — so it’s clear that was me clicking.

Let’s look at all the cons of having Google Ads on my blog. (1) I generated exactly $0 of cash from them, (2) it took me time to set up, (3) it eats up prime real estate on my pages, (4) it cheapens my content,  and (5) the ads are not even useful to my readers — they don’t click on them as I’ve discovered, and frankly, I don’t blame them.

Therefore, I will use the real estate for something else, and I will “monetize” my blog in a different way; in the same way as I do every “side” conversation I have with clients, sub-contractors, colleagues: in completely unforeseen and un-quantifiable ways.

In reality, like most bloggers, I write this blog in the first place because it forces me to identify and organize “nuggets” of information that I come across or generate. Second, I write it, again like most bloggers, in the spirit of participating in my professional community.

Making a few cents or dollars, as a third-rank motivation, is not worth the real-estate that Google Ads consume.

Instead I can strengthen the “message” of my blog pages quite a bit by making good use of that real estate; something much more interesting than ads. I am thinking of content that tries to convey ideas that are less transient in nature than the blog posts, in a way that is more compelling than a blogroll, and not hidden in a secondary page. For now, I’ll just post ads of my own making. Ha!

So… I am saying “Bye Bye Google AdSense, it was nice knowing you”.

(lingering fear: will this affect my google search Page Rank negatively?)

Topic du jour is Conficker: http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/03/conficker-how-a.html

In my opinion the first thing software makers should invest in to reduce the number of vulnerabilities, is more code reviews focused on security. Senior engineers are ‘gatekeepers’; they need to be held accountable (within their own company, not publicly) if their team releases flaws whih could have been prevented.

A second one is more testing. Hackers are able to find vulnerabilities, so software makers can too! Software makers have the (dis)advantage of knowing how the software is built, which gives them the ability to model vulnerabilities, and then test for them. It’s in great part a matter of having test engineers spend time on the problem.

But since this is all being done already, yet obviously not well enough, I think what we need to do is to re-inject a bit of good old TQM into the whole process.

It’s an economic problem more than anything. A bit like the fight against terrorism; it’s way more expensive to prevent it than it is to commit an act of terrorism.