techno.blog("Dion")

Why the Patent System Inhibits Innovation Today looked interesting to me. It does have some good points, but it takes a long time to get to them. The bulk of the commentary surrounds the evolution of open source software.

That is something I talked about over on OpenXource.

I don’t agree that the evolution is purely:

Good code succeeds; bad code fails and dies off.

I think there is a lot of great dead code :) Although, it does get back to “what is good code”?

Here is a little more from the article:

It is a sad fact that genetics and bio-engineering are areas today where so many patents are being awarded. Many of us will recall how U.S.-based Ricetec patented Thai Fragrant Jasmine Rice. With such patents being awarded, especially on human genetics, perhaps this line of thought will not hold true for much longer.

The question arises, if a company can crack the genetic makeup of rice and patent it, control its use and for all intents and purposes, own it, what then will happen with all these patents on human genes? Will it mean that in being born, we are infringing on a number of patents — using the genetic code without a license?

This silly situation started a quarter of a century ago on June 16th, 1980, when some bright microbiologist (who was probably more of a lawyer than a scientist) won a patent for a modified strain of bacteria. Before this, and rightly so, patent law was applied to inventions, not discoveries, and could not be applied at all to living things.

Erik Hatcher has published a Meet Lucene online presentation (slides + audio).

The presentation is a nice introduction to Lucene. There are still a lot of people out there who do not know about this open source gem, and if you haven’t had a chance to check it out, watch this.

One of the best reasons to watch it, is that you learn what Lucene IS and ISN’T. I still find that people assume it is a web crawler, rather than a search API.

My long time friend (from high school in London) Dave Coleman, has written about patents, claiming that they are useful :)

I agree that they are useful in general, but I think the key could be:

Actually, in Europe software isn

This is great news. I was really concerned that the lobbyists were going to push through their agenda, and then all hell would break loose.

This doesn’t meant that the book is closed of course. The fight will continue. However, congrats to everyone involved in winning the battle.

I have been re-reading The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. Not only does it remind you how obvious natural selection is, but it got me thinking about the selection process that we have in I.T.

It is interesting to look at the various communitees that we have, and how either the corporations tweak the model of natural selection (or something egos in the communitees themselves).

I wrote about a couple of examples in:

Natural Selection in Open Source

What a crazy day for announcements. AspectJ 5. JDO 2.0 voting. And now we get the 8.0 release of PostgreSQL.

PostgreSQL is a highly-scalable, SQL compliant, open source object-relational database management system. With more than 15 years of development history, it is quickly becoming the de facto database for enterprise level open source solutions.

What’s new in 8.0

• Win32 Native Server
• Savepoints
• Point-In-Time Recovery
• Tablespaces
• Improved Buffer Management, CHECKPOINT, VACUUM
• Change Column Types
• New Perl Server-Side Language
• Comma-separated-value (CSV) support in COPY

Download

There has been a lot of open source chatter recently. Is it good. Is it bad. What does it even mean to be open source. Etc.

A couple of interesting tid bits:

Coming out of the open source closet

Norman Richards of JBoss talks about the critique that JBoss is not Open Source. I can understand why Norman is frustrated. You can have issues with JBoss, Inc., and you can have issues with LGPL, but JBoss is a FORM of open source.

http://members.capmac.org/~orb/blog.cgi/tech/java/coming_out_of_the_o.html

Open source injustice – a new gripe

Mike Keith of Oracle (TOPLink… or HOPLink) has a gripe.

He feels that there is an injustice in how tollerant people are to hear about a product pitch for a vendor, versus a product pitch for open source.

I agree. A product pitch is a product pitch. :)

It is interesting to see the Hierarchy of the Apache Software Foundation.

It is amazing to think of the amount of hard work and effort that goes into open source communities such as Apache (and others).

It is interesting to see the Hierarchy of the Apache Software Foundation.

It is amazing to think of the amount of hard work and effort that goes into open source communities such as Apache (and others).

Lucene is in my top list of open source projects. It is quality.

Erik Hatcher and Otis have done a great job on the Manning book, and it was good to hear that it is now available.

I even have a case study on how TheServerSide integrated Lucene in there.

The Lucene in Action e-book is now available at Manning’s site:

http://www.manning.com/hatcher2

Manning also put lots of other goodies there, the table of contents, “about this book”, preface, the foreward from Doug Cutting himself (thanks Doug!!!), and a couple of sample chapters. The complete source code is there as well.

Now comes the exciting part to find out what others think of the work Otis and I spent 14+ months of our lives on.

Erik