So, what is [Intellectual Ventures] actually doing? Buying up loads of patents and licensing them to companies who calculate it’s not worth the fight is patent trolling 101. Yet the scale they’re operating on puts them on new ground, and opens new opportunities. It seems obvious to get corporate investors on board by promising them immunity from patent claims. With enough patents you stop trying to license them one-by-one and just tax each industry at some non-negotiable rate. No doubt they have more tricks I haven’t even thought of, but these potential devices really do make them a new breed of Super Trolls.

…

Now, I don’t really care if one company leeches off the others. But if they want to tax software, they have to attack free software otherwise people will switch to avoid their patent licensing costs. And if you don’t believe some useful pieces of free software could be effectively banned due to patent violations, you don’t think on the same scale as these guys.

Rusty Russell, “Superfreakonomics; Superplug for Intellectual Ventures.“, July 7th, 2010

I’m also opposed to software patents.

Watching Patent Absurdity: how software patents broke the system is time well spent.

Related Posts:

• My own Great Artists Still Steal, March 4, 2010
• VC and principal of Union Square Ventures, Fred Wilson has a lot of great insights and updates on patents.

[U.S. Vice President Joe] Biden told reporters Thursday at a press conference in Washington, D.C. “But piracy is theft. Clean and simple. It’s smash and grab. It ain’t no different than smashing a window at Tiffany’s and grabbing [merchandise].”
Greg Sandoval, “Biden to file sharers: ‘Piracy is theft’“, cnet

What is “clean and simple” is

• That’s propaganda.
• Piracy happens on the high seas, or in Disney movies.
• Nothing smashed nor grabbed. Property is a physical concept. There is no loss of property from copyright violations.
• There is room for fair use.

I don’t recommend using or distributing works that you don’t have license to.

I do recommend getting involved in Free Culture and Open Source.

One of my great inspirations is Lawrence Lessig’s keynote presentation at the annual Open Source Convention (OSCON) made on July 24, 2002. My favorite parts are:

• Creativity and innovation always builds on the past.
• The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it.
• Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past.
• Ours is less and less a free society.

“In conjunction with his self-professed affinity for sharing source code, John Carmack has open-sourced most of the major id Software engines under the GPL license. Historically, the source code for each engine has been released once the code base is 5 years old.”
Wikipedia article: id Software

Photo "cmd.exe" cc by-sa flickr user n3wjack

I think this is a novel approach, and I’m surprised that I haven’t heard of any other companies making this sort of commitment. Fellow open source zealots would warm up to you and you’d earn the love of developer communities everywhere. It also increases the chance that your software has a greater legacy.

Let me know if you’re committing to opening the source of aged versions of your proprietary software. Will it be 2, 3 or some other length of years from now?

I find Google Gmail the best for my own workflow, but it is ripe with complexity and user experience issues.

Well over an five hour ago I emptied from trash a huge amount of email. Since then I couldn’t log back in till just now:

Text copy:

Temporary Error (500)

We’re sorry, but your Gmail account is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes.

If the issue persists, please visit the Gmail Help Center »

Try Again Sign Out

This happens to a lesser extend every time I delete a large number of emails. I understand Google doesn’t like deleting things — they want to to organize the world’s information — but every time it leaves me upset.

Space and search are Gmail’s killerest feature, so it shouldn’t be unexpected that people would use it as a temporary data store of huge amounts of information.. Here I am trying to make excuses for them. It’s unacceptable that any action can take your email down for hours.

I recently tried Thunderbird 3– I really want to love it — but felt like I was in configuration hell. It would have taken days to get it as usable as Gmail already is for me.

A lot of colleagues and friends get a lot of milage from Apple Mail, but Mark Pilgrim’s “Juggling Oranges” rings in my ears. The articles describes Mark walking away from Mac for an completely open source stack, “Mail.app 2.0 helpfully auto-converted all my wonderful mbox files into Apple’s shitty undocumented format. ”

Why is individual emails still the focus on email? Instead of bigger picture collaboration with people?

Anyone dreaming of the fabled open source Mac mail client Letters.app? Synovel Spicebird looks intriguing.

This bug was pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. Probably not many people had ever run into it. But after hours of puzzling over those broken image tags, it felt darned good to find it, and — more importantly — squash it. And after the release of WordPress 3.0, nobody will have to scratch their heads over it again. Yay me!
Dougal Campbell, “Bug Chasing“, March 7th, 2010

“It turns out that the International Intellectual Property Alliance, an umbrella group for organisations including the MPAA and RIAA, has requested with the US Trade Representative to consider countries like Indonesia, Brazil and India for its “Special 301 watchlist” because they use open source software.”

By Bobbie Johnson, “When using open source makes you an enemy of the state“, guardian.co.uk, Feb 23rd, 2010.

Canada is already “special”. We, Canadians, welcome these innovative countries!