Should we be worried that BMC has to resort to suing the competition, rather than innovate and beat them fair and square. Is this a sign that BMC is very worried about what Service Now is doing to them?
-----Original Message----- From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG] On Behalf Of John Baker Sent: Thursday, September 25, 2014 4:01 PM To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: BMC sues SNOW Hello I've reviewed some of the patents and I was amused by what passes for a 'patent'. http://www.google.co.uk/patents/US5978594 This patent is all about agents running on hosts, controlled by a central service. It is described as "novel", but it's not something invented by BMC and is present in many other products. For example, both IBM Websphere and Oracle Weblogic have a concept of a central service (WAS deployment manager, WL admin server), that feeds instructions/configuration to nodes running JVMs. This is not novel - it's common place. http://www.google.com/patents/US6816898 Collecting performance metrics. I can do that in a couple of lines of Python and it's nothing new. A typical large bank will have lots of this stuff, both purchased and home grown, littered on their networks with an "operations team" constantly monitoring it. http://www.google.co.in/patents/US6895586 This one is awful. It sounds like BMC claim to have invented a system of storing data in a hierarchical document using namespaces - you know, what we commonly refer to as XML. There's no intellectual property in designing a schema. http://www.google.co.uk/patents/US7062683 This patent seems to suggest BMC have invented a method of troubleshooting via flowcharts - something I recall doing at school in the mid-80s, and I recall plenty being present in my 6502 Assembler guide. I suspect this and other patent relates to the way in which a BMC product works, but copying the concept is not a crime (Microsoft do not own the concept of a word processor, or sending an email). Indeed, for every concept pinched by a competitor, BMC will have pinched one themselves - such as graphing data to display metrics, which is almost certainly patented by some other company. I think the core problem with many IT patents is they aren't actually 'inventions' but a great way for lawyers to make money. After all, they are hardly going to turn around and tell a BMC senior manager, "I'm sorry mate, but this patent has no value". Real inventions, such as James Dyson's bag-less vacuum cleaner, have real value. These patents seem to tell a competitor more about how the internals of a BMC product works rather than defining an 'invention' of real value. John Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, but I can use Google :) _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org "Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years" Information contained in this email is subject to the disclaimer found by clicking on the following link: http://www.lyondellbasell.com/Footer/Disclaimer/ _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org "Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years"
