GeekSpeaker

I am an advocate of innovation in all forms. What I don’t like to see is those without the ability to create keeping those who can create wonderful new novel products, services, and software. Boston.com is reporting that Northeastern is suing Google over a way to split queries over multiple computers also known as a clustered database. From the Boston Globe article:

"This particular patent has to do with the fundamental database architecture, which they use to serve up every single result they serve to you," said Michael Belanger, president of Jarg Corp. in Waltham. Jarg is a privately funded developer of advanced search technology. The company was cofounded by Northeastern associate professor Kenneth P. Baclawski and holds an exclusive license to the patent, which is owned by Northeastern.

The patent covers a method for chopping up database queries into multiple portions and having each part processed by a different computer. This allows for much faster searching of huge databases, like Google’s vast index of Web pages on the Internet.

I work for a fortune 50 company, I have written patents, and I’ve come up with new concepts. These are concepts that our company will use though. The whole idea behind patents is, to protect & reward those who go the extra mile use their creative powers to envision something that doesn’t exist, and then to create that vision until that single thought is a product or service in our economy. As far as I know, this Jar Corp doesn’t even have a product, and they need to concentrate on providing a service instead of trying to litigate. As far as suing Google, they’ve not even seen the real tech behind Google, and it’s technology that’s probably changing every day. To say that this whole concept of clustered database queries is unique is unfathomable. Oracle uses the technology in its 11g product. The idea is that you can take a bunch of commodity boxes, through common OSes and databases on them and then you have an area of memory (oracle calls it an SGA) which resides above the hardware that sends tasks over the cluster. 

To sum up what I’m thinking here. I don’t know whether or not there should be software patents. What I do know that novel approaches to doing things which require a lot of work, but could be quickly reversed engineered and then put into a competitors product shouldn’t be allowed. On the opposite side of the coin there is a troll economy. Think patents, not products…. This doesn’t help our innovative world and it only serves the selfish few who would profit off of such lame patents that never come to market. I’ve come to the conclusion that if you invent a technology, you better be bringing it to market, or you are not only a patent troll but a technology squatter.