Software patents, revisited

February 16, 2012 1 Comment

So, seven years after I managed to make slashdot, now I’ve managed to make the front page of Hacker News. I have to say, the IsNot patent is the gift that just keeps on giving. I think my comments from the original patent discussion still apply, quoted here since the original post has been lost:

In the wake of the IsNot patent brouhaha, aside from the "you are scum" comments, people have had several reasonable questions about my own feelings about the situation. So let me pause and talk about software patents for a moment. Lest there be any question about this, what follows are my own personal feelings about the matter and have nothing to do with official Microsoft policy.

Personally, I don’t believe software patents are a good idea. I realize that algorithms lie in that grey area between a mechanical process (which is patentable) and an abstract idea (which is not), but at a purely practical level I think that software patents generally do much more harm than good. As such, I’d like to see them go away and the US patent office focus on more productive tasks. I have nothing but contempt for any company that tries to use patents to achieve what they could not through purely competitive means. This includes Microsoft, should they ever choose to do so or have they ever chosen to do so. (I’m not aware of any such situation, but I’m hardly omniscient.)

However, software patents do exist. So while the good fight goes on to get rid of them, I also believe that it would be dangerously naive to not play the game as best we can in the meantime in as principled a way as possible. There are a lot of people who would love nothing more than to just take a piece out of Microsoft either because they can or because they want to get rich and not for any better reason than that. I’ve been around long enough to see the kind of trouble that patents can cause us, and so I believe the best defense is a good offense. While I don’t believe in using patents in an unprovoked way, I do believe in having a robust patent arsenal with which to defend ourselves should someone get it in their head that they want to hold our products hostage for money or just to cause trouble.

One of the most unfortunate aspect of the software patent system is that there is a distinct advantage, should you have the money to do so, to try and patent everything under the sun in the hopes that something will stick. If someone has a patent on "a biological system used to aspirate oxygen gases to fuel biological processes" (i.e. lungs), I wouldn’t be surprised. (If there isn’t, no fair submitting the patent before me!) This is bad both because it jams up a system that’s not really equipped to handle software patents well in the first place and because it increases the likelihood of broad, random patents slipping through the system. Microsoft has been as much a victim of this as anyone else, and yet we’re right there in there with everyone else, playing the game. It’s become a Mexican standoff, and there’s no good way out at the moment short of a broad consensus to end the game at the legislative level.

So that’s how I feel about software patents in general. As far as the specific IsNot patent goes, I will say that at a personal level, I do not feel particularly proud of my involvement in the patent process in this case. Beyond that, there’s not much to say: many comments addressed legal questions which I am woefully unqualified to comment on and for which speculation would be very

To my original blog post, I would add a few things. The first thing is that, thankfully, I believe the IsNot patent has long since either been rejected or abandoned, and in this things are exactly as they should be. The second thing is that while I still continue to hope that we will rid ourselves of software patents, I recognize now in hindsight that the general problem of patents—that there is a strong financial incentive to patent everything under the sun—is an inherent trait of a game that gives the “winners” huge economic advantages. Even if software patents disappeared tomorrow, there’d still be lots of stupid and silly patent applications in non-software areas. Since I think that, overall, the patent system is a good idea, this means some aspects of this are simply inevitable. (Still doesn’t justify the IsNot patent application, though. That was just dumb.)

My final comment regards my assertion that I would hold “nothing but contempt” for any company that used software patents in an offensive, rather than a purely defensive, manner. That is still the case and, sadly, I am profoundly disappointed with some of the things that Microsoft has done in this area since I wrote that post in 2005. The best I can say is that I continue to hope that we will do better in the future.

You should also follow me on Twitter here.

Filed under Microsoft Tagged with , ,

Black Hole Projects

August 1, 2011 4 Comments

OK, so I may have reset my blog, but there were some interesting posts that probably shouldn’t disappear totally down the memory hole. This is one of them, which I am rescuing from back in 2004 because of it’s continuing relevance. It seems that six months can’t go by without something I hear making me think of this. Edited from the original for clarity and to bring it up-to-date.

Many, many years ago, Steve Maine took the opportunity to reminisce about a project at Microsoft that was being worked on while he was an intern. He says:

[ When I was an intern… ] there was this mythical project codenamed “Netdocs”, and it was a black hole into which entire teams disappeared. I had several intern friends who got transferred to the Netdocs team and were never heard from again. Everyone knew that Netdocs was huge and that there were a ton of people working on it, but nobody had any idea what the project actually did.

I also knew a few people who invested quite a few years of their lives into “Netdocs” and it got me thinking about the phenomenon of “black hole projects” at Microsoft (and elsewhere, I’ll wager). There was one I was very close to very early in my career that I managed to avoid, many others that I just watched from afar, and one or two that I got dragged into despite my best intentions. I can’t really talk about most of them since most never saw the light of day, but it did get me thinking about the peculiarly immutable traits of a black hole project. They seem to be:

  • They must have absurdly grandiose goals. Something like “fundamentally reimagine the way that people work with computers.” Nobody, including the people who originate the goals, has a clear idea what the goals actually mean.
  • They must involve throwing out some large existing codebase and rewriting everything from scratch, “the right way, this time.”
  • They must have completely unrealistic deadlines. Often this is because they believe that they can rewrite the original codebase in much, much less time than it took to write that codebase in the first place.
  • They must have completely unrealistic beliefs about compatibility. Usually this takes the form of believing you can rewrite a huge codebase and preserve all of its little quirks without a massive amount of extra effort.
  • They are always “six months” from from major deadlines that never seem to arrive. Or, if they do arrive, another milestone is added on to the end of the project to compensate.
  • They must consume huge amounts of resources, sucking the lifeblood out of one or more established products that make significant amounts of money or have significant market share.
  • They must take over any group that does anything that relates to their absurdly broad goals, especially if that group is small, focused, has modest goals, and actually has a hope of shipping in a reasonable timeframe.
  • They must be prominently featured as demos in public settings such as company meetings, all-hands, conferences, etc. to the point where people groan “Oh, god, not another demo of this thing. When is it ever going to ship?”
  • They usually are prominently talked up publicly by high level executives for years before dying a quiet death.
  • They usually involve “componentizing” some monolithic application or system. This means that not only are you rewriting a huge amount of code, you’re also splitting it up across one or more teams that have to all seamlessly work together.
  • As a result of the previous point, they also usually involve absolutely massive integration problems as different teams try madly to get their components working with each other.
  • They usually involve rewriting the application or system on top of brand-new technology that has not been proven at a large scale yet. As such, they get to flush out all the scalability problems with the new technology.
  • They are usually led by one or more Captain Ahabs, madly pursuing the white whale with absolute conviction, while the deckhands stand around saying “Gee, that whale looks awfully big. I’m not sure we can really take him down.”
  • Finally, 90% of the time, they must fail and die a flaming death, taking down other products with it (or at least severely damaging them). If they do ship, they must have taken at least 4-5 years to ship and be at least 2 years overdue.

It’s kind of frightening how easy it is to come up with this list – it all kind of just poured out. Looking back over 19 years at Microsoft, I’m also kind of frightened at how many projects this describes. Including some projects that are ongoing at the moment…

You should also follow me on Twitter here.

Filed under Microsoft, Programming Tagged with , ,

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 94 other followers