[Nottingham] Google Gets Umbrella Patent For Cloud Operating Systems

[Martin]

On 04/09/12 10:43, Jason Irwin wrote:
> On 04/09/12 10:32, Martin wrote:
>> And ofcourse, Mainframe architecture of the 1960's and 1970's pre-dates
>> all this 'cloud' stuff and offered pretty much the same features but
[---]
> Yes.  About the only thing that has change really is the diversity of
> devices/clients software; how they connect and how the "mainframe" deals
[---]
> About the only real difference is that the client today is often not
> totally dumb.  It only needs the "cloud" for some use cases (e.g.
> calendar sync) or for things it can't do itself (e.g. a game which uses
> a server to do the rendering and merely displays the result).

Sounds like the old Newbry terminals of old that offered off-line
editing that allowed you to carefully craft your commands for hours to
then bombard the mainframe all in one sub-second gulp by pressing the
"send" key... That nicely saved wasting supercomputer time from mere
text editing...

See:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/alecmuffett/sets/72157626858769724/

>> How many ways can you skin a rabbit in the legal world?...
> As many ways as you want.  Unless someone gets a patent on the general
> methods of skinning rabbits; which tends to be the problem today.  How
> we go about solving that problem without destroying the protection
> genuine patents provide is a very good question.

With some of the 'modern' business practices, even if you have a
'genuine' patent, unless you already /are/ a big bad mega-corp, whatever
patent you might have is effectively unenforceable.

Worse still, you also have the industry of "Patent Trolls" and legal
extortion... ("Pay us a fee so that we promise not to threaten you with
our patents portfolio that we know you 'obviously' infringe but can't
disclose which ones...")


Perhaps we need to do away with the parasitic patents industry
altogether and rely on the speed of innovation to avoid any need for
turgid parasitic litigation?...

Cheers,
Martin

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