FYI everyone, I let Frederic at ReadWriteWeb know that there was some
interest from Wikimedians about Wave integration, and he kindly
a sample of the thread in his post about his impressions after a demo.
The unfortunate side is that his general impression is that it was more like
super enahnced email/IM than wiki.
Steven Walling
On Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 9:31 PM, Tim Starling <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote:
Robert Rohde wrote:
Assuming Google is intending to be "not
evil" about this, I would
guess the point of the intellectual property (e.g. patents and
trademarks) is to prevent people from creating things that are called
and/or identify themselves as Wave servers and yet don't conform to
the communications protocol. And there is a reasonable point there.
Regardless of what features and services a server might offer, it is
still important that the underlying communications protocol be
something that all parties can make sense of, otherwise your network
gets bogged down in gibberish.
Anyway, that's the optimistic interpretation.
The optimistic interpretation is that it is what is called a
"defensive patent", and that they don't intend to enforce it at all.
The USPTO is notoriously bad at finding related work that doesn't come
up when they search their own patent database, so a defensive patent
can be useful to prevent similar patents being registered by
competitors. It may also be useful to strike down future patents in
court.
Red Hat, for instance, have taken this approach:
https://www.redhat.com/legal/patent_policy.html
Some people have suggested that Wikimedia should register some
defensive patents, although they probably didn't realise how much time
and money is involved in registering and maintaining the things.
-- Tim Starling
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