Elon Musk, Tesla Motors, and My Own Patent Apologies

It's hard for me to believe that I have sat on a this draft blog post for almost 6 years.  But I'm stuck on a plane this evening, inspired by Elon Musk and Tesla's (cleverly titled) announcement, "All Our Patents Are Belong To You."  Musk writes:

Yesterday, there was a wall of Tesla patents in the lobby of our Palo Alto headquarters. That is no longer the case. They have been removed, in the spirit of the open source movement, for the advancement of electric vehicle technology.

When I get home, I'm going to take down a plaque that has proudly hung in my own home office for nearly 10 years now.  In 2004, I was named an IBM Master Inventor, recognizing sustained contributions to IBM's patent portfolio.

Musk continues:

When I started out with my first company, Zip2, I thought patents were a good thing and worked hard to obtain them. And maybe they were good long ago, but too often these days they serve merely to stifle progress, entrench the positions of giant corporations and enrich those in the legal profession, rather than the actual inventors. After Zip2, when I realized that receiving a patent really just meant that you bought a lottery ticket to a lawsuit, I avoided them whenever possible.

And I feel the exact same way!  When I was an impressionable newly hired engineer at IBM, I thought patents were wonderful expressions of my own creativity.  IBM rewarded me for the work, and recognized them as important contributions to my young career.  Remember, in 2003, IBM was defending the Linux world against evil SCO.  (Confession: I think I read Groklaw every single day.)

Yeah, I filed somewhere around 75 patents in about 4 years, 47 of which have been granted by the USPTO to date.

I'm actually really, really proud of a couple of them.  I was the lead inventor on a couple of early patents defining the invention you might know today as Swype (Android) or Shapewriter (iPhone) on your mobile devices.  In 2003, I called it QWERsive, as the was basically applying "cursive handwriting" to a "qwerty keyboard."  Along with one of my co-inventors, we actually presented a paper at the 27th UNICODE conference in Berlin in 2005, and IBM sold the patent to Lenovo a year later.  (To my knowledge, thankfully that patent has never been enforced, as I used Swype every single day.)

QWERsive

But that enthusiasm evaporated very quickly between 2005 and 2007, as I reviewed thousands of invention disclosures by my IBM colleagues, and hundreds of software patents by IBM competitors in the industry.

I spent most of 2005 working onsite at Red Hat in Westford, MA, and came to appreciate how much more efficiently innovation happened in a totally open source world, free of invention disclosures, black out periods, gag orders, and software patents.  I met open source activists in the free software community, such as Jon maddog Hall, who explained the wake of destruction behind, and the impending doom ahead, in a world full of software patents.

Finally, in 2008, I joined an amazing little free software company called Canonical, which was far too busy releasing Ubuntu every 6 months on time, and building an amazing open source software ecosystem, to fart around with software patents.  To my delight, our founder, Mark Shuttleworth, continues to share the same enlightened view, as he states in this TechCrunch interview (2012):

“People have become confused,” Shuttleworth lamented, “and think that a patent is incentive to create at all.” No one invents just to get a patent, though — people invent in order to solve problems. According to him, patents should incentivize disclosure. Software is not something you can really keep secret, and as such Shuttleworth’s determination is that “society is not benefited by software patents at all.”Software patents, he said, are a bad deal for society. The remedy is to shorten the duration of patents, and reduce the areas people are allowed to patent. “We’re entering a third world war of patents,” Shuttleworth said emphatically. “You can’t do anything without tripping over a patent!” One cannot possibly check all possible patents for your invention, and the patent arms race is not about creation at all.

And while I'm still really proud of some of my ideas today, I'm ever so ashamed that they're patented.

If I could do what Elon Musk did with Tesla's patent portfolio, you have my word, I absolutely would.  However, while my name is listed as the "inventor" on four dozen patents, all of them are "assigned" to IBM (or Lenovo).  That is to say, they're not mine to give, or open up.

What I can do, is speak up, and formally apologize.  I'm sorry I filed software patents.  A lot of them.  I have no intention on ever doing so again.  The system desperately needs a complete overhaul.  Both the technology and business worlds are healthier, better, more innovative environment without software patents.

I do take some consolation that IBM seems to be "one of the good guys", in so much as our modern day IBM has not been as litigious as others, and hasn't, to my knowledge, used any of the patents for which I'm responsible in an offensive manner.

No longer hanging on my wall.  Tucked away in a box in the attic.

But there are certainly those that do.  Patent trolls.

Another former employer of mine, Gazzang was acquired earlier this month (June 3rd) by Cloudera -- a super sharp, up-and-coming big data open source company with very deep pockets and tremendous market potential.  Want to guess what happened 3 days later?  A super shady patent infringement lawsuit is filed, of course!

Protegrity Corp v. Gazzang, Inc.
Complaint for Patent InfringementCivil Action No. 3:14-cv-00825; no judge yet assigned. Filed on June 6, 2014 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut;Patents in case 7,305,707: “Method for intrusion detection in a database system” by Mattsson. Prosecuted by Neuner; George W. Cohen; Steven M. Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge LLP. Includes 22 claims (2 indep.). Was application 11/510,185. Granted 12/4/2007.

Yuck.  And the reality is that happens every single day, and in places where the stakes are much, much higher.  See: Apple v. Google, for instance.

Musk concludes his post:

Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor, but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world’s most talented engineers. We believe that applying the open source philosophy to our patents will strengthen rather than diminish Tesla’s position in this regard.

What a brave, bold, ballsy, responsible assertion!

I've never been more excited to see someone back up their own rhetoric against software patents, with such a substantial, palpable, tangible assertion.  Kudos, Elon.

Moreover, I've also never been more interested in buying a Tesla.   Coincidence?

Maybe it'll run an open source operating system and apps, too.  Do that, and I'm sold.

:-Dustin

How I REALLY WISH I could use my Intel NUC

Ars Technica posed an interesting question back in October: We have an Intel NUC -- what should we do with it?  Here's one idea...

Of course I have Ubuntu One storage and Dropbox account.  And I'm very well familiar with Box.com and dozens of other highly successful cloud storage solutions too.

These are unfortunately not the solution I want, to the problem I have.

I've considered many, many alternatives.  But ultimately, the only product on the market which I'm willing to buy is a co-lo service.  I want full root access, inside of a virtual private server, running a pristine, unspoiled, unmodified Ubuntu LTS server.  And attached to that, I want a lot (like, 1TB or more) of highly available, scalable block storage.  Not object storage.  BFS.  Block frickin' storage.  I want to format it with the file system of my choosing, and encrypt the data within with a cryptosystem and key of my choosing.

And finally I want to run rsync over an encrypted ssh connection multiple times per day to push my backups "to the cloud".

That's it.  And that's neither U1 nor Dropbox.  That's a little bit like rsync.net, but not really.

I currently use AWS's EC2 and EBS.  I'm happy with the technology, but unhappy with the cost and security.  You can encrypt your data, but Amazon certainly could subvert your keys and encryption (or collude with the NSA to subvert your keys and encryption).

You're welcome to try, but you're not going to convince me to do this some other way.  Sorry.  This method is time-tested, recovery-proven.

A few years ago, I blogged about how I used a Dell Mini9 netbook as an Ubuntu Server.  I tucked that machine away in a nook at my parents house, and it served me reasonably well as a (free) co-lo for a several years.

 But there is now a clear and present opportunity now for a new cloud services business to emerge.  And the industry perfect poised to offer such a cloud service is one of the oldest brick-and-mortar institutions in human history....

Banks.

Yes, banks.  You know, the important looking place your parents used to visit a couple of times per week to deposit and cash checks, but now largely replaced by robots called Automated Teller Machines (ATMs)?

There's really only 2 reasons I've visited a bank in the past 15 years.

1. To have a document notarized
2. And to access my safe deposit box

And every single time I do the latter, I yearn for a power outlet and an Ethernet jack in that magic, safe little box.

Consider that for a minute...  How nice would it be, to have your physical co-lo machine, under lock and key, in a safe, held by an old and trusted financial institution?  A physical location that you could travel to, authenticate using multiple forms of identification, present a key, open a sturdy looking box, and access your micro PC.  With current technology, that's my sleek little Intel NUC.  (Or alternatively, give me a USB power port and I'll use my Raspberry Pi.)

I think banks are extraordinarily well positioned to offered this as a service, as there are strong, established standards for physical security, and they're well placed in most neighborhoods around the world.  Establishing the service would mean beefing up redundant power supplies, internet connectivity, and air flow in at least one portion of the safe deposit vault (which might mean an altogether new vault).

And the multi-factor authentication!  Yay!

And the service itself?

• I currently pay $50 per year for a small, document-sized safe deposit box (which, by the way, the NUC fits within -- I've already checked).
• The NUC itself, at maximum energy consumption, draws 17W, at $0.125/KWh (the current rate in Austin, Texas), costs approximately $18.60 in energy costs per year
• And a bare minimum Internet service plan runs about $20/month in my area, or $240/year

So at retail costs, I think we're talking somewhere between $300 - $500 per year for this service.  Done well, this is easily worth $1200 per year to me.  Which I would delightfully buy, as this is actually not far off from my yearly AWS bill.

How long have I been thinking about this?  Nearly 10 years!  Regrettably, I filed way-too-many patents during my 8 years at IBM (which itself deserves a blog post of contrition).  Including one on this very concept (US Patent 7,484,657; filed July 14, 2005; granted February 3, 2009).  Not that IBM has done anything productive with it to date, much to my chagrin :-(

So there, Ars Technica, that's what I would do with my Intel NUC :-)

:-Dustin