Howard Chu wrote:
I wouldn't call query containment "garbage" -
Garbage = to patent something which is prior art :)
LDAP search queries can be pretty complex, and it certainly takes some
thinking to get caching right. Give credit where it's due. I don't
believe in software patents though; this is all pretty stupid.
This was my point.
And of course, Apurva's original implementation was pretty atrocious;
I had to rewrite about 95% of it before it would offer any performance
benefit over no cache at all.
:)
The second patent is essentially one step beyond syncrepl and other
similar replication mechanisms that have existed for many years. We've
had partial and fractional replication for ages. The difference that I
see here is that he's using query containment to decide to return a
referral to the master server, when a searched-for entry isn't present
in the replica. In our current implementations, if you ran such a
query against a partial replica, you'd just get no result back for the
missing entries. As patents go, it follows the standard formula - add
one step to an existing well known process and presto, you've invented
something new. Whether it's actually useful or not is a different
question - IMO, anything that relies on LDAP referrals is
fundamentally flawed anyway.
Thanks for the insight Howard !
I have some friends working in big telco companies, and they told me
that their boni was partly based on the number of patents they register.
This clearly leads to a ridiculous patent race.
We see the very same thing happening in the research area : if you don't
publish, you don't exist. Thanks god, Ig Nobel has been created to grant
the most stupid research papers... (have a look at this paper :
http://www.sunshine-project.org/incapacitants/jnlwdpdf/wpafbchem.pdf.
Top of page 2 is simply hilarious :)
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cordialement, regards,
Emmanuel Lécharny
www.iktek.com
directory.apache.org
