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RPX, a new startup, has come onto the scene offering to aggregate a patent portfolio, and offer a covenant not to sue to companies who license their entire portfolio in aggregate. They are funded by venture capital and also claim to have IBM and Cisco as initial clients.

Dogg, that reminds me of some cards.

Much like Roast Beef’s greeting cards, a technology patent originator can fathomably come up with an infinite pool of them by just applying the same rubric to a new set of circumstances (in the patent trolls’ case, by appending 14 pages of a definition of a computer to tie a business process to a tangible machine — le voila!). This means, as a creator of software technology, you are potentially on the hook for limitless amounts of patent infringement, as nearly everything you can do on a computer has had a patent filed on it in the past 20 years. The mere fact that one entity is aggregating a portfolio of patents has no bearing on the fact that there are potentially unlimited amounts of patents that can be aggregated by others, much as readers of Achewood would probably be able to assist Roast Beef in coming up with limitless amounts of new greeting cards.

It looks like TechCrunch is perhaps appropriately skeptical. Their business model revolves around subscription fees instead of enforcing patents through offensive litigation. If i’m understanding these terms correctly, if you don’t subscribe to their patent portfolio, then you are potentially subject to offensive litigation (which is the practice they are claiming to fight against). Correct me if i’m wrong, but doesn’t this seem to you to just be an extension of existing patent trolling practices (i.e. adding on subscription revenues to existing litigation + settlement proceeds) that is made feasible by the aggregation of large amounts of patents with a large amount of venture capital, instead of an attack on the NPE cottage industry? If so, wouldn’t it seem disingenuous to frame oneself as such?

It is not possible for one entity to aggregate all broad technology patents that pose a threat to oneself. Therefore, the subscription of a company to one particular NPE’s portfolio does not preclude the possibility of being sued for infringement by others. If a subscription model proves to be a more profitable / reliable revenue stream, you can expect other NPEs to adopt it too. Who knows, perhaps portions of the subscription model will be patented by RPX, and they’ll force other NPEs to license their patent as well if they want in to the game. It would be like patenting some aspects of the business process of patent trolling, which would be a fun irony, but still a sad one.

Some days, it seems like buying rights gets you a better return than buying property, but mainly if you’re an asshole.

Tech

I’ve been working on my own PHP-based project for a month or so, and have rewritten some basic generic libraries from scratch in PHP. I’m pondering whether I should open source them, and would appreciate it if you would comment on this post if you’re interested in seeing me put in the effort to write docs, standardize, then toss specific portions or all of it online. I learned my lesson through Freetag; it takes a lot of energy to keep something maintained. Here’s some of what I have:

• A database wrapper singleton around PDO
  • Simplifies code for working with “prepared statements” DBI-style. PDO prepared statements work great for getting around SQL injection, but I found them cumbersome by nature.
  • Consolidated error and exception handling with custom callback support.
  • I’ll eventually add fancier stuff in here, such as handle splitting for replicated architectures in here, and some read-after-write consistency code.
• A simple nonce library for protecting against XSRF/CSRF
• A simple library for handling file and image upload/resize
• A simple code profiling utility
• Some validation routines (I would like to add in some self-documenting API neatness that I wrote about before, when I get some time)
• Some other random handy stuff, like arg signing, link building, human interval descriptions.

It’s all pretty consistent with my philosophy of abstracting away website-related functionality instead of architecture. With this set of limited libraries, i’m building at a pretty fast rate, and I can almost always figure out what’s going on by just looking at one or two files. I’m trying to get a nice foundation that I can build fairly serious stuff on top of without getting completely confused.

Oh, and it all depends on php/filter being enabled with a default filter of “special_chars”. Come to think of it, I might write a separate post about using that, because it’s handy.

Tech

These days, i’m generally a packaged framework-for-the-web curmudgeon. I prefer simple libraries corresponding to simple, common, generic problem sets. It’s one thing to adopt a general-purpose scripting language, or even a general-purpose “hard” programming language, but it’s another thing entirely to download or buy a prepackaged framework on the basis of marketing material or buzz about the shiny new ur-framework for all development. My opinion was arrived at mostly through personal experience, and undoubtedly people will have different opinions based on their own experiences working with such software.

My hypothesis is that frameworks tend to occur naturally out of the needs of specific applications of technology. If you’re using a programming language to build a listing-based website, and you’re building things from scratch, patterns will evolve in your code. If you’re being rigorous about refactoring, you’ll be acutely aware of patterns that may be abstracted away, and it will be very natural to reduce them in some form or another. Eventually, if you add more developers, the lead developer will probably generalize an approach to building features that looks awfully like a framework. It could be lightweight, generator based, MVC based, queue based, or whatever — but this evolved framework, at its essence, is a reduction of noticed patterns about listing data systems to practice. However, why not avoid repeating all this work, and instead skip it by picking up a third party off-the-shelf framework and starting with that off the bat?

A heavily evolved framework is a codification of patterns that work for a specific problem set. This is fundamentally what newcomers to programming languages do not understand when they go reading neato tutorials for the framework du jour. It is also what many framework zealots (and sometimes, evangelists) do not understand when they are aggressively hunting down misguided naysayers who misapply frameworks and complain about it in public.

The risk of having programmers begin their work on top of established frameworks is that they typically do not have the experience necessary to understand what patterns have been adopted, why they have been adopted, and how those patterns would apply to their task at hand. The only people who understand this are usually the most experienced developers of the framework.

Unfortunately, the type of developer most attracted to the marketing claims of frameworks are inexperienced ones. And even more unfortunately, most frameworks’ greatest advocates are experienced developers of the frameworks, whose subtle and nuanced defenses about the proper use of their framework go completely over the heads of most beginners, who only stare googly-eyed at fancy baked demos.

This leads to large, bizarre codebases built on hacks, on top of hacks, on top of frameworks. It also leads to completely unrealistic expectations from businesspeople about the sustainability of development pace for fast, new, framework-based prototypes. It’s par for the course for our industry, and it’ll probably continue for a very long time as the trade of programming grows up in the new century.

Is there a reasonable argument that some “general-purpose” frameworks are good enough for nearly all “straightforward” web applications? Maybe — but this is a tricky subject. Many web applications share the same fundamental characteristics. If you have a general-purpose framework, it may work especially well with the characteristics of web applications. The thing that most web applications have in common is that most of them are dropped far before they get to a very serious type of problem that i’m referring to. So, in the sense that I don’t believe most web applications will get very far, it’s probably fine to use a framework for experimentation or prototyping. But one should be prepared to do the real work at some point, if the project is to be taken seriously.

There is also the annoying fact that when frameworks are popular, they tend to be a big hindrance to prototypes that never got rewritten. The point at which the misapplication of technology becomes a problem too often coincides with surges in popularity of a service. This leaves you open to competition and puts you in a very difficult place, especially if you’ve worked hard to open up a new market.

My advice for anyone starting to get a bad feeling about frameworks: work on real world projects, and start from scratch at least once. Real world projects jolt you out of the 5-minute screencast armchair Internet expert mentality. They have messy requirements, will suddenly strike you with landscape-changing revelations about how you’ve been going about things wrong, and will challenge you to grow more than you thought you ever could. Invest in your frustration up front, and the reward? When you’ve built a mature project, maybe you can generalize it and turn it into a framework… ;P

Tech

I’m so proud of my country tonight. Barack Obama has become the next President-Elect in an historic Presidential race that saw the best and the worst emerge from everyday Americans. His acceptance speech was moving; not only did he emphasize the importance of individuals to his campaign, he also brought up the topic of humility and addressing the country’s problems together. We can indeed find common ground to work on the most threatening problems to our country.

I’ve had a lot of difficulty even listening to the Republican point of view over the past eight years. I don’t doubt that the neoconservatives in the Bush Administration used and abused the differences of opinions between people in America to drive a wedge between us all – public, house, senate, and media. However, Obama’s campaign has gone beyond just earning my vote; it has also made me reconsider my emotionally charged reactions towards GOP talking points.

The first was Joe Biden’s anecdote about motives during the Vice Presidential debate:

I have been able to work across the aisle on some of the most controversial issues and change my party’s mind, as well as Republicans’, because I learned a lesson from Mike Mansfield. Mike Mansfield, a former leader of the Senate, said to me one day — he — I made a criticism of Jesse Helms. He said, “What would you do if I told you Jesse Helms and Dot Helms had adopted a child who had braces and was in real need?” I said, “I’d feel like a jerk.” He said, “Joe, understand one thing. Everyone’s sent here for a reason, because there’s something in them that their folks like. Don’t question their motive.”

Joe’s point is that although we may oppose other peoples’ political views, we should not succumb to prejudice about their character. Barack Obama’s campaign has shown that you can address the American public with maturity, dignity, and calm assertiveness, and still win the highest office in the nation. We can’t mistrust an entire segment of Americans simply for identifying with some policy views of the Republican party.

We can and should argue strongly with logic and passion when we disagree, but we cannot forget that our opponents are Americans too. I believe that both Obama’s acceptance speech and McCain’s concession speech strummed on this chord, and I sincerely hope that the political bases of both parties can be mature enough to rise to a more respectful level of discourse, and heal the wounds of divisiveness that have proven so profitable for the special interests in this country. Now let’s see what we can accomplish in the next four years.

Tech