Read Miguel’s post about the patent suit between Sun and NetApp. I guess both parties are carefully avoiding stating something which is outright lies so instead they tiptoe around the issue a bit.

Here is my guess of how things went down:

Step 1: NetApps first approached StorageTek behind the cover of a third party intermediary seeking to purchase STK patents. This is what Jonathan mentions in his blog and nothing in the blog entry of the NetApp CEO contradicts this, it just omits it.
Step 2: Sun when being asked about the patent purchase turns around and says ‘sorry not for sale, but you can license.’ Sun having talked to the third party mentioned they make this offer directly to NetApp. So As the NetApp’s CEO says, Sun contacted them with a list of patent (the same list NetApp had asked to purchase) and said they where available for licensing.
Step 3: NetApp realize that their patent purchase request has backfired a bit and starts looking for a way out. Their first solution is to look through their own patent portfolio probably hoping to find something to cross license with Sun. (Or if they got stupid with greed, they tried to both get Sun to agree that they where not infringing on Sun’s patents and at the same time demand patent fee payment for their own).
Step 4: Licensing lawyers/people at Sun are faced with what is more than a ‘standard’ patent licensing agreement and for some reason tries to just drop it instead of dealing with it. (A scarily common event in many big companies).
Step 5: NetApp either due to worry about future legal action from Sun or due to greed decide that a request for a summary judgement about the validity of the Sun patents (which they originally wanted to buy) and a countersuit would be the best way forward.
Step 6: NetApp CEO presents his view in blog post in the hope to not get to much bad reactions from the open source/free software community.

Step 7: Sun CEO replies in his own blog.

All the above is just guesswork by me of course for what happened, but these set of events would not contradict either of the two versions of what happened.

My guess is that NetApp just got greedy in this process and starting behaving stupidly. Probably in the end they make the same fatal mistake that SCO did, they assumed the cost of a lawsuit is what you pay your lawyers. Instead the real cost of a lawsuit will often be the collateral damage it will inflict on your business. NetApp might end up experiencing the same thing that SCO did (although on a smaller scale), that suddenly their customer base wants to avoid doing business with them as they are seen as a patent troll and a enemy of open source software.

Been briefly taking part in and watching a discussion about wether Launchpad should be released. The debate made me think about wether all code releasing is truly important or even a good thing.

Once upon a time I was writing articles for a now defunct news site called linuxpower.org. For this site a special publishing system had been written. I know Jeremy considered releasing the code we used for the site a couple of times, but in the end I remember him concluding that the code wasn’t really in a release worthy state and that he didn’t have the time or the interest to clean it up in order to add yet another half-done publishing system the world.

While we all where strong supporters of free software none of us had any problems with this decission. Part of the reason for that is that releasing the code of something doesn’t automatically make it useful for people. In fact it may only be a distraction as you get more useless crap showing up on google when you are trying to find something.

For the release of sourcecode to be truly useful the code needs to be in a state where its been prepared for consumption by anyone else than the original creator. Getting hold of a source package that do not compile or run cause you don’t have access to the 7 post-it notes with manual instructions, the 19 steps only stored in the memory of the creator and is using some database tables you don’t have an sql script to create tend to be of abysmally little value.

A lot of source code is written by one or two persons for their own private or professional use. Code written like that is often using a lot of shortcuts to achieve its tasks, like hardcoding values, no code comments, no documentation, no real build system, relying on a database structure thats been created manually and incrementally over a period of time and so on. Thus sending that code out there doesn’t make it instantly useful. So unless your application is truly special nobody will probably ever bothering spending the weeks or months it would take to make it useful to themselves or the even longer period it would take to make it useful to the world at large.

That said there are of course cases where even such code could be useful, for instance if the code documents a certain piece of hardware or fileformat. But once again it would require the code to actually correctly document the hardware or fileformat in question, sending out a file called nvidia-driver.tar.gz which contains a driver you tried to make by trial and error, but which never did anything apart from cause 4 of your graphics card to stop working permanently is probably not doing anyone any favours. At least not without a lot of code comments and a big warning.

Which brings me a back to trying to pressure someone to open source something. In many cases unless the person asked to release some code wants to release the code to the world and thus is willing to take the time and effort to make sure the world would truly be able to use the code then getting the code released would probably be of little or no value. In fact it might just be adding to the noise making googling for actually useful code a little harder.

So in terms of Launchpad. I am sure it could be a useful tool for various people or groups if released, but release means more than doing ‘tar -cvf lp.tar /var/www/’. Thus unless one can convince Canonical that there is true value for them in spending the time and the money to prepare LP for a release and maintaining that release as a public project, then all achieved is probably getting a big tarball of useless crud put onto the net and at the same time have wasted developer time on an effort of little value.

In the meantime maybe effort should instead be spent on improving existing projects already available which has a featureset similar or close to what Launchpad offers.

Saw another article today where Balmer talks about the Novell/Microsoft deal. Once again he demonstrates in my opinion how extremely broken the whole patent system around software is and how companies are trying to abuse that brokenness.

While I have little love for organisations like MPEG LA at least they clearly define what they license out. If you take a license for MPEG4 for instance you will get a full list of patent numbers and nations which they apply to. If one would like to challenge or work around those patents one would at least be able to figure out what one are up against.

In the Microsoft case they are not licensing something concrete for a specific amount of money. Instead they are basically saying ‘we have a thicket of patents and we think a unquantified subset of them applies to you, pay a fee or you risk a lawsuit’. So if you want to do a risk assesment or try to work around these patents your only option is to dig through the global (primarily US) patent office databases for anything concerning Microsoft or companies bought by Microsoft and try to figure out if any of those patents apply to anything you do or have. The cost of such a move is probably prohibitive. Of course if you do find some patents which could apply to something you do, then the question of wether they should have been granted in the first place comes up. You then have the option to spend lots of money on trying to find prior art to invalidate the patent(s) in question. But the problem here is that most companies who do patent blackmail tend to make sure that their licensing fees are lower than the expected cost of getting their patents invalidated, so you are stuck in a lose/lose situation. You can give in to their crocked ways and license their patents no matter how bogus, or you can try to fight them and end up spending even more money. One could dream of a situation where the cost of any patent prior art research and litigation should be covered by the US patent office, as they are the ones who are primarily to blame for the current mess.

Not sure this situation can be fully remedied without the US doing a full rehaul of their patent system, but maybe a stopgap measure would be a law that forbids the claim of patents against a competitor without being specific about which patent and which application implementing it at least. That would put much more of cost on the would be attacker instead of the defendant.