I was clicking around this evening looking for resources regarding software patents.

I'm interested in how smaller companies can protect themselves against patent abuse, and how best an individual software engineer can act in a manner that is both pragmatic and moral. For the company, defensive patenting is the ideal - you build up a portfolio of (perhaps dubious) patents and then use them to fend off those who ask you to pay to license their own (usually dubious) patents by invoking some kind of Mutually Assured Destruction scenario. The aggressive party backs off and you work out some kind of cross-licensing agreement. It's clear there's not much benefit here, but you retain freedom to operate, and you don't add to the problems so long as you don't make the first move.

However I confess I am uncomfortable contributing to the patent mountain in this way, since however laudable the current policies of a company may be, you can expect said policies to change over time according to the wishes of others (different investors, management or owning parent company if things go well, or whoever liquidators can flog the IP assets to if it doesn't.) And I really don't want to be part of the software patent problem! I want to help push the world back towards sanity with regard to these issues.


Anyway, after following a trail of links around the globe I happened on one particular UK advocacy site and went looking for contact details on the maintainer's homepage. And there I saw an interesting little service named GeoUrl.

So some kind soul has taken it upon themselves to host and build and maintain a database of mappings from web pages (such as homepages) to real world locations associated with their subject (such as where the owner lives.) It collects the information from meta tags in pages that it is pinged to go look at - all very Nu Wave Web. Once you're registered, the obvious killer application is to find the pages that are geographically close to you: and here are mine.

And who's that I see about ten entries down, a couple of miles to my south? Why, it's that Birkett fellow who has already been mentioned here more than once - he's got there already. We chatted about blogging software a couple of months back but I never actually stayed on thar train of thought long enough to get to reading his. (If you enjoy thinking, and you software engineer for a living, it is fascinating. Otherwise, probably not.)

I find my use of the Web can be such a curious combination of the global and the incestuous. At the start of the evening I set out with a question to ask the world. I got somewhere, but then my attention drifted and... I ended up spending several hours reading the thoughts of the guy who sits next to me at work.

Tags: copyfighting, software_development
Current Mood: pondering