[Foundation-l] Google Wave and Wikimedia projects

[Steven Walling]

FYI everyone, I let Frederic at ReadWriteWeb know that there was some
interest from Wikimedians about Wave integration, and he kindly
linked<http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_wave_our_first_hands-on_impressions.php>to
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 at wikimedia.org>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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