Fixing Software Patents, One Hack At Time

Software patents are broken and patent trolls are seriously hurting innovation. Companies are spending more money on buying patents to launch offensive strikes against other companies instead of competing by building great products. There are numerous patent horror stories I could outline where they are being used for all purposes except to innovate. In fact the software patent system as it stands today has nothing to do with innovation at all. This is the sad side of the Silicon Valley. While most people are whining about how software patent trolls are killing innovation some are trying to find creative ways to fix the problems. This is why it was refreshing to see Twitter announcing their policy on patents, Innovator's Patent Agreement, informally called IPA. As per IPA, patents can only be used in an offensive litigation if the employees who were granted the patents consent to it. I have no legal expertise to comment on how well IPA itself might hold up in a patent litigation but I am thrilled to see companies like Twitter stepping up to challenge the status quo by doing something different about it. If you're an employee you want three things: innovate, get credit for your innovation, and avoid your patents being used as an offensive tool. IPA is also likely to serve as a hiring magnet for great talent. Many other companies are likely to follow the suit. I also know of a couple of VCs that are aggressively pushing their portfolio companies to adopt IPA.

The other major challenge with software patents is the bogus patents granted based on obvious ideas. I really like the approach taken by Article One Partners to deal with such patent trolls. Article One Partners crowdsources the task of digging the prior art to identify bogus patents and subsequently forces the US patent office to invalidate them. Turns out that you don't have to be a lawyer to find prior art. Many amateurs who love to research this kind of stuff have jumped into this initiative and have managed to find prior art for many bogus patents. It's very hard to change the system but it's not too hard to find creative ways to fix parts of the system.

I would suggest going beyond the idea of crowdsourcing the task to find the prior art. We should build open tools to gather and catalog searchable prior art. If you have an idea just enter into that database and it becomes prior art. This would make it incredibly difficult for any company to patent an obvious idea since it would already be a prior art. We should create prior art instead of reactively research for it. Open source has taught us many things and it's such a vibrant community. I can't imagine the state of our industry without open source. Why can't we do the same for patents? I want to see Creative Commons of patents.

The industry should also create tools to reverse translate patents by taking all the legal language out of it to bring transparency to show for what purposes that patents are being granted for.

I would also want to see an open source like movement where a ridiculously large set of patents belong to one group - a GitHub of patents. And that group will go after anyone who attempt to impede innovation by launching an offensive strike. If you can't beat a troll then become one.

Silicon valley is a hacker community and hackers should do what they are good at, hack the system — to fix it — using creative ways.

Photo: Opensource.com

Drupal On The Cloud, Beyond Content Management

This post is co-authored by Manish Garg and Chirag Mehta

Drupal is widely recognized as a great content management system, but we strongly believe that Drupal offers a lot more than that – a framework, a platform, and a set of technology – to build and run enterprise applications, specifically on the cloud. This post is an attempt to explore the benefits and potential of Drupal on the cloud.

Elasticity

One of the last things the customers should worry about their websites is the performance degradation due to sudden spike in the traffic. For years, the customers had to size their servers to meet the peak demand. They overpaid, and still failed to deliver on promise, at peak load. Cloud solves this elasticity problem really well, and if you are using Drupal, you automatically get the elasticity benefits, since Drupal’s modularized architecture - user management, web services, caching etc. - is designed for scale-up and scale-down on the cloud for elastic load.

PaaS

If Heroku’s $212 million acquisition by Salesforce.com is any indication, the future of PaaS is bright. Drupal, at its core, is a platform. The companies such as Acquia through Drupal Gardens are doing a great job delivering the power of Drupal by making it incredibly easy for the people to create, run, and maintain their websites. This is not a full-blown PaaS, but I don’t see why they cannot make it one. We also expect to see a lot more players jumping into this category. The PaaS players such as phpfog and djangy have started gaining popularity amongst web developers.

Time-to-market and time-to-value

Drupal has helped customers move from concept to design to a fully functional content-rich interactive website in relatively short period of time using built-in features and thousands of modules. Cloud further accelerates this process. Amazon and Rackspace have pre-defined high-performance Drupal images that the customers can use to get started. Another option is to leverage PaaS as we described above. The cloud not only accelerates time-to-market and time-to-value, but it also provides economic benefits during scale-up and scale-down situations.

Application Management

The cloud management tools experienced significant growth in the last two years and this category is expected to grown even more as the customers opt for simplifying and unifying their hybrid landscapes. With Drupal, the customers not only could leverage the cloud management tools but also augment their application-specific management capabilities with Drupal’s modules such as Quant for tracking usage, Admin for managing administrative tasks, and Google Analytics for integration with Google Analytics. There is still a disconnect between the native cloud management tools and Drupal-specific management tools, but we expect them to converge and provide a unified set of tools to manage the entire Drupal landscape on the cloud.

Open source all the way

Not only Drupal is completely open source but it also has direct integration with major open source components such as memcached, Apache SOLR, and native support for jQuery. This not only provides additional scale and performance benefits to Drupal on the cloud, but the entire stack on the cloud is backed by vibrant open source communities.

Security

It took a couple of years for the customers to overcome the initial adoption concerns around the cloud security. They are at least asking the right questions. Anything that runs on the cloud is expected to be scrutinized for its security as well. We believe that the developers should not explicitly code for security. Their applications should be secured by the framework that they use. Drupal not only leverages the underlying cloud security, but it also offers additional security features to prevent the security attacks such as cross-site scripting, session hijacking, SQL injection etc. Here is the complete list by OWASP on top 10 security risks.

Search and Semantic Web

One of the core functionally that any content website needs is search. Developers shouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel. Integration with SOLR is a great way to implement search functionality without putting in monumental efforts. Drupal also has built-in support for RDF and SPARQL for the developers that are interested in Semantic Web.

NoSQL

The cloud is a natural platform for NoSQL and there has been immense ongoing innovation in the NoSQL category. For the modern applications and websites, using NoSQL on the cloud is a must-have requirement in many cases. Cloud makes it a great platform for NoSQL and so is Drupal. Drupal has modules for MongoDB and Cassandra and the modules for other NoSQL stores are currently being developed.

Drupal started out as an inexpensive content management system, but it has crossed the chasm. Not only the developers are trying to extend Drupal by adding more modules and designing different distributions, but importantly enterprise ISVs have also actively started exploring Drupal to make their offerings more attractive by creating extensions and leveraging the multi-site feature to set up multi-tenant infrastructure for their SaaS solutions. We expect that, the cloud as a runtime platform, will help Drupal, ISVs, and the customers to deliver compelling content management systems and applications on the cloud.

Open Source Software Business Models On The Cloud

There are strong synergies between Open Source Software (OSS) and cloud computing. The cloud makes it a great platform on which OSS business models ranging from powering the cloud to offer OSS as SaaS can flourish. There are many issues around licenses and IP indemnification and discussion around commercial open source software strategy to support progressive OSS business models. I do see the cloud computing as a catalyst in innovating OSS business models.

Powering the cloud: OSS can power the cloud infrastructure similarly as it has been powering the on-premise infrastructure to let cloud vendors minimize the TCO. Not so discussed benefit of the OSS for cloud is the use of core algorithms such as MapReduce and Google Protocol Buffer that are core to the parallel computing and lightweight data exchange. There are hundreds of other open (source) standards and algorithms that are a perfect fit for powering the cloud.

OSS lifecycle management: There is a disconnect between the source code repositories, design time tools, and application runtime. The cloud vendors have potential not only to provide an open source repository such as Sourceforge but also allow developers to build the code and deploy it on the cloud using the horsepower of the cloud computing. Such centralized access to a distributed computing makes it feasible to support the end-to-end OSS application lifecycle on single platform.

OSS dissemination: Delivering pre-packaged and tested OSS bundles with the support and upgrades has been proven to be a successful business model for the vendors such as Redhat and Spikesource. Cloud as an OSS dissemination platform could allow the vendors to scale up their infrastructure and operations to disseminate the OSS to their customers. These vendors also have a strategic advantage in case their customers want to move their infrastructure to the cloud. This architectural approach will scale to support all kinds of customer deployments - cloud, on-premise, or side-by-side.

The distributed computing capabilities of the cloud can also be used to perform static scans to identify the changes in the versions, track dependencies, minimize the time to run the regression tests etc. This could allow the companies such as Blackduck to significantly shorten their code scans for a variety of their offerings.

Compose and run on the cloud: Vendors such as Coghead and Bungee Connect provide composition, development, and deployment of the tools and applications on the cloud. These are not OSS solutions but the OSS can build a similar business model as the commercial software to deliver the application lifecycle on the cloud.

OSS as SaaS: This is the holy grail of all the OSS business models that I mentioned above. Don't just build, compose, or disseminate but deliver a true SaaS experience to all your users. In this kind of experience the "service" is free and open source. The monetization is not about consuming the services but use the OSS
services as a base platform and provide value proposition on top of
that. Using the cloud as an OSS business platform would allow companies to experiment with their offerings in a true try-before-you-buy sense.