Emmanuel Lecharny wrote:
Howard Chu wrote:
I don't
believe in software patents though; this is all pretty stupid.
This was my point.
Cool.
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 would expect the above patent to fail the obviousness test, if nothing else.
Or perhaps I should now file a new patent on all of the above, adding in the
use of chaining instead of returning a referral back to the client, since
that's always my preferred method for distributed operation. Given the crap
that gets granted these days, it would probably fly too.
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.
Yep. Same in a lot of places; same when I worked at Locus and PLATINUM.
Somewhat the same at JPL, though as a government employee we couldn't actually
get patents. But we still got bonuses for publishing inventions...
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 :)
Sigh. Our tax dollars at work...
--
-- Howard Chu
CTO, Symas Corp. http://www.symas.com
Director, Highland Sun http://highlandsun.com/hyc/
Chief Architect, OpenLDAP http://www.openldap.org/project/
