IBM Locking Up Lots of Cloud Computing Patents 70
dkatana writes: In an article for InformationWeek Charles Babcock notes that IBM has been hoarding patents on every aspect of cloud computing. They've secured about 1,200 in the past 18 months, including ~400 so far this year. "For those who conceive of the cloud as an environment based on public standards with many shared elements, the grant of these patents isn't entirely reassuring." Babcock says, and he adds: "Whatever the intent, these patents illustrate how the cloud, even though it's conceived of as a shared environment following public standards, may be subject to some of the same intellectual property disputes and patent trolling as earlier, more directly proprietary environments."
If you can't beat 'em... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:If you can't beat 'em... (Score:5, Insightful)
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The PC isn't dead... but the PC vendors brain is.
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Except for P series (POWER), Z series (mainframe), disk storage, tape drives, and tape libraries.
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Re:If you can't beat 'em... (Score:5, Interesting)
So much wrong here it is hard to know where to start.
Legacy? POWER 8 was released later year. Z13 was released 6 months ago. Z13 is a brand new design.
As for that post you linked to, let's just say the writer is an idiot. First and foremost, you can not compare MIPS numbers between two different architectures. Ever. And you can't compare MIPS numbers between two different workloads. Ever. But this bozo attempted to do just that.
Secondly, NOBODY buys the 26 MIPS model for production use. They buy it as a hot backup. By buying that model, they save a ton on both hardware and software costs, but can convert it to a full speed machine, about 150x faster, in seconds should they need to transfer workload from a primary machine. But this idiot tried to use it for productive use, and complained that it was slow. Duh.
Lastly, he complains about the disk configuration, but doesn't seem to have a clue how to set it up. All current DASD that supports CKD mode (max 9GB disk size) also supports SCSI mode. But for some bizarre reason he configures it as CKD over FICON, then complains about it. If he had a brain he would configure it as SCSI over FCP, and have up to 2TB images, which work just fine with z/VM and Linux.
They beat themselves (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly right. Add just a smidgen of shortsightedness and some pressure from the board, and you have the perfect storm of next-quarter-itis.
After a few quarters like that, the CEO takes off for the next company, as the company tries to put out the fires they left behind them -- fired experts, cheapened and crippled products, new hires that don't know much about the domain, insufficiently-tested but out-the-door-anyway products...
Yeah, responsibility to the shareholders. Which means: Short term thinking and cannibalistic profiteering. That's the US corporate mantra, right there.
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It probably helps in IBM's case, the current CEO started working for the company in 1981 as an engineer. Since she was recruited from inside the company, and has had a long career with them, she is less likely to pull the crap you're mentioning.
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Bad advice for the modern age. Today's patent trolls don't actually produce anything, so they don't care what else you've patented as it can't affect them. Patent war chests are now worthless.
Re:If you can't beat 'em... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:If you can't beat 'em... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why none of this should be patent eligible. It's harmful to allow software to be patented especially when the patent is overly broad and general in it's language. It's harmful to allow any configuration of systems and software to be patented. The USPTO is completely incapable of telling the difference between what's patent worthy and what's bullshit in these areas.
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The USPTO is basically a rubber-stamping desk. They approve just about anything, and depend on the courts to later invalidate the ones that shouldn't have been allowed.
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Well, I wouldn't say that's the only reason.
The libertarian in me say that when it comes to someone else's ability to restrict what I do, shy of causing them physical harm, the only valid response is, fuck off.
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You can be sure IBM will be looking to monetize these patents.
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Correct. The concern I have is who will buy them out when they collapse and what the buyer does with the patent portfolio. IBM is shaky and getting worse by the day. Here is one analysis of their problems:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/st... [forbes.com]
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I would throw Google and Facebook into the mix as they are awash in cash.
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That said I was shooting for just mid 80's early 90's big iron
This cloud (Score:4, Interesting)
...will eventually crash and burn. Sure it's convenient, powerful and cheap, but inherent with major security risks. If I were a company, there is no way in hell I would ever deliberately host or put anything on the cloud. I don't care how 'secure' things are, there are way to many attack vectors and unknown vulnerabilities. It's only going to get worse before people start to see if for what it truly is - dangerous!
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What about when you need a huge bunch of CPUs to compute something? That's an aspect of "the cloud" that actually seems reasonable. As long as you don't put anything you want kept secure out there, of course.
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If you trust all that, and you believe it isn't vulnerable to the NSA and hackers, that's your call to make.
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What about when you need a huge bunch of CPUs to compute something?
Actually that's the grid. The buzzword that preceded the cloud.
The cloud is just a way for companies with too much money and not enough brains to spin up large numbers of servers they don't need to then sit idle hosting websites nobody visits. This is my bread and butter, selling websites and virtual servers (in the cloud) to people who don't need them. It's obvious from looking at my customers near-empty weblogs that they're pissing their money away, but the web designers and site administrators like mysel
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Not true! I can't think of a safer place to keep my 15gb of [*cough*] cat pictures and movies...
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After all these years I have no idea what "the cloud" even actually is supposed to mean. Appears to be nothing more than an empty marketing term to cow people into becoming accepting of entering into arrangements where they will be exploited as string puppets.
--
"Finally, we will access, disclose and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails, other private communications or files in private folders), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary."
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It's just the abstraction of a remote server. The cloud isn't a technological innovation, though it depends a lot upon things like virtual machines to implement. It's a business model in which the customer pays for access to a computing resource, but is in no way involved in or even aware of how this resource is provided. This allows the cloud provider to benefit from economy of scale - they don't need to keep enough hardware to handle every customer at peak demand, because customers aren't all going to pea
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"Sure it's convenient, powerful and cheap"
This is all that's needed.
"but inherent with major security risks"
On one hand, "major security risks" haven't stopped any business, from driving cars to operating nuclear energy facilities or sending people to the moon; on the other hand, no, there is no inherent security risks about cloud computing; if you think otherwise, it must be because you ignore the meaning of either "inherent" or "cloud computing".
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...will eventually crash and burn. Sure it's convenient, powerful and cheap, but inherent with major security risks. If I were a company, there is no way in hell I would ever deliberately host or put anything on the cloud. I don't care how 'secure' things are, there are way to many attack vectors and unknown vulnerabilities. It's only going to get worse before people start to see if for what it truly is - dangerous!
The dangerous thing is having your information on computers you don't control. Every service that bills your credit card is a risk. Your Bank, VISA, MasterCard, Netflix, Amazon, and every single account and online purchase you've ever made. There is virtually no difference whether those services are deployed on dedicated hardware or not.
Barring a complete collapse of our civilization, there is no escaping having your data on other people's computers. The "cloud" makes very little difference how "risky" t
the cloud is just a computer (Score:4, Insightful)
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Well That's Kind Of Their Thing (Score:2)
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I've come up with a couple of algorithms that could be patented were I in the US - and usually discovered later on that someone else had already thought it up, but due to a difference in terminology used I had not been aware of them at the time.
First to File (Score:1)
Now you know why it's not a "reform" (replacing the traditional First to Invent), but rather a Xmas wish list item pushed by the likes of IBM, Microsoft and Qualcomm.
When I was at IBM, I remember that patents were front in center for employee reviews. They kept emphasizing, that's a big part of your job, along with customer escalations and L3 support.
"public standards"? (Score:5, Insightful)
since when the hell is "the cloud" based around "public standards"!?!?!? Each and every major vendor's offerings are pretty much unique and proprietary. vSphere isnt EC2 isnt SmartOS isnt KVM isnt HyperV isnt OpenCompute. Some of these are more open than others while some are entirely closed systems.
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Obviously (to us geeks, only) it was never about open standards, but Amazon and Microsoft in particular have put a lot of money into P.R. campaigns to imply to the public a number of things about the fundamentals of their "cloud" strategies that are the opposite of true. Its their M.O., really.
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Use LAMP as your "cloud" platform and tell IBM to shove their patent where their the lamps don't shine.
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If you think LAMP has anything remotely to do with cloud you really should not be commenting.
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Cloud has no real definition. I consider a "cloud" application to be an application that is relatively easy to pick up and move to a different hosting vendor.
The "vendor" definition of "cloud" is YOU paying a subscription for proprietary or difficult-to-migrate resources instead of buying a box.
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I think you're missing a key point. "Cloud" tends to imply massive scalability on demand. For instance, if you need to to perform a finite set of large-scale computations, it would make sense to rent some temporary space for those. That's "cloud computing". Buying your own hardware would be an insane waste of money. A practical example: an company producing an MMO might purchase server space to run client simulation bots to load-test their servers prior to releasing the game.
As another example, large c
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Very few need "massive scaling on demand". They need reasonable scaling with easy hosting vendor swappability. If the cloud can't deliver that, it's a niche thing for blue moon projects.
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SmartOS is more than just KVM, there are also Zones, and now LX Zones too (Linux Branded Zones): https://wiki.smartos.org/displ... [smartos.org]
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That's what I was thinking. I don't claim to be an expert on every cloud technology out there, but everything I've seen about the cloud has been heavily proprietary.
goodwill test (Score:1)
This will test how IBM's intentions are aligned with well being of the cloud industry.
First reaction may be to label them as patent trolls and assume they will attempt to lock down the market preventing anyone else using the concepts of cloud computing and suing other projects out of existence. Alternatively, however, IBM may be acquiring these patents to protect developers against other companies taking opportunity at becoming trolls by taking advantage of this green field. Imagine if Oracle or similar got
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First reaction may be to label them as patent trolls... and will not actively use them for unfair profit gain.
First, second, third and fourth reaction, actually. IBM is a well known patent troll that has taken unfair advantage of the patent system since the dawn of geek time. Just search for Nazgul.
Hmmm ... (Score:2)
How many of these boil down to "a system and methodology for doing something we already do all the time but in the cloud"?
So many computer patents these day are pretty much garbage.
I hope these actually have some merit instead of just having "in the cloud" tacked onto existing stuff. So many patents which get issues represent nothing new or novel, just "but on a cell phone" (which is a special case of computer), or "but with a network".
Part of me suspects a good chunk is neither new nor novel.
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The problem is that Congress recently snuck in language to make it easier to get patents on things that are merely improvements on existing things. Being able to do something 'on a computer' or 'in the cloud' may in fact be such an improvement. And of course it is HOW you go about doing it in the cloud that is patented, not the IDEA of using the cloud.
In case you are wondering, this recent change happened in 1793.
IBM invented timesharing (Score:1)
cloud computing ?? (Score:3)
Do these patents actually cover 'cloud computing' or do they refer to the abortion that has become the next great marketing term/buzzword following green ??
Cloud computing used to refer to a developing technology that allowed a virtual work environments to be cobbled together from varied technologies and hardware platforms. Then suddenly storing data in someone else's server farm or data center was putting your stuff in "the cloud" and any true meaning was lost under the avalanche of marketing and salesmanship.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
IBM: King of Patent Trolls (Score:2)
IBM has been for many, many years using their patent portfolio offensively to generate revenue. Their favorite targets are mid-sized companies with enough money to make it worth their while but not enough resources to fight them in a prolonged court case nor the will to risk their business on the result of that. The terms of the contract are never released, so it doesn't make the news, but they are VERY well-known for doing this, and if you search the Internet, you will find many articles from solid sourc
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"I wonder why the USPTO is overworked and understaffed?"
Congress keeps cutting their budget.
nope.. (Score:2)