Ian Foster

Those Clever Guys at IBM ...

We all know that the US patent system has its weaknesses: that every now and then, people get granted patents for things that are either well known or obvious. This probably explains why people keep filing dumb patents: you never know when you might hit the jackpot.

In any case, here's a doozy: following on some 40 or more years of distributed computing research, and 15+ years of commercial and academic grid computing, IBM has finally gotten around to applying for a patent on grid computing. For example:

a computer-implemented method of providing access to grid computing resources available to a plurality of users comprises receiving, from a requesting entity, a request to use a specific grid computing resource to perform a defined function; and routing the request to the specific grid computing resource in accordance with the request.

If only Condor, Globus, Sun Grid Engine, PBS, LoadLeveler (oops, that's an IBM product), Platform LSF, etc., etc., had thought of that! Wait, they did, a decade or more ago. Sigh ...

OpenDocument Challenge to Microsoft Open Specification Promise

Our decision in the 1990s to release Globus software as open source has resulted in me learning far more than I ever thought I'd need to know about the law. I suspect that not all readers know as much as they should about the licensing issues involved in both open standards and open source software. That is unfortunate, because there are subtleties that can result in confusion, uncertainty, and even liability. In this regard, I found a recent posting by the OpenDocument Foundation of interest. It certainly convinced me that I don't understand as much as I thought I did about these issues. I'm glad that we've adopted the standard Apache v2 license for Globus software.

The OpenDocument Foundation posting follows: