Patent me up, patent me down...

Well, MS and the FSF are at it again. It is a pretty interesting debate.

Having participated in open-source project and used open-source software, I have certainly enjoyed the benefits of both worlds.

I was reading the argument of both legal experts. On the MS side is nothing new. These are our patents and we want to protect our IP.

On the FSF, is where the legal fireworks are because they have/want to prove that software is not patentable. Thus it should be free.

Their argument is that software is a mathematical algorithm (this is my interpretation, and I am not expert in U.S. IP law) and such is made out of numbers and nobody can own numbers.

This argument kind of equates software to natural resources: air, etc. The problem with this argument, I think, is that one can not find Linux, GCC, or Windows floating in the atmosphere or growing in a field. Somebody sat and came up with the algorithm. And it is for this person to decide what it wants to do with it.

Should oil be free too? Could "joe doe" drill where Anadarko has spent thousands of hours of expertise and hefty amounts of money to find oil for free? At least natural resources are easier to spot.

This seems like going the tragedy of the commons route. Not even China is on that road anymore.

Like the lawyers around here say: "es mejor un mal acuerdo que un buen juicio"...

.Net Progress, back to Bay Area, and other great escapes chapter...

Well, this RCP work does take its time but it is fun and it helps us. I have started to get the new architecture on Visual Studio together. This a little snapshot of the toolbar. (Not particularly different from DevRiot for Eclipse. And that's is the idea: lowering the learning curves...)

I also have been in touch with my friend to put DevRiot through the grinder of DataMining development. Progress but it will take time to show.

On another front, I have been meeting with some researchers from Santiago to start looking at the "writing engine" (so users will do nothing but look at test results and develop)

Finally, after 18 months I will be back to the States. The rest of the crew has been back several times but not me.

We will be visiting San Carlos/Bay Area. A new nephew is on the way :-}

I will post some pictures of an early spring trip to Costa da Morte which was quite pleasant: great waves and great seafood :-}

600--, 100++, Thread me!

Well, close to 600 downloads of the white papers. In little over a year, it seems like a good word-of-mouth.

The beta downloads have passed the 100 mark. With little prodding too. The interesting thing is that some of the downloads of Mac and Linux versions are coming from the Microsoft world(?)

I have been working more on my friend's project lately since we also have to pay bills :-} and working on the .Net add-in.

On the tool itself, another friend of mine came asking for help. This developer, like many others, was facing the daunting task of having to develop their own code plus the unit tests for that code.

In this case, there was also a lot of java, parallelism, and heavy database access involved. No wonder :-} Regrettably, our load and stress logic is not ready.

Hopefully, she will forgive me...