Right back at ya, Jon

I’ve followed Jonathon Schwartz’s rise within Sun Microsystems for a while. I met him very briefly a few years ago during the the tech boom and was taken back by a few comments that were very progressive for someone inside Sun during “the glory days”. His effective rise to the top has been a real breath of fresh air for Sun, and has certainly got me thinking about Sun products a lot more than I have been for the past few years. In short, he’s just what Sun needed. I do not, however, agree with his thinking all the time. Case in point was his post on September 30th about IP (Intellectual Property) and specifically software patents. You can certainly argue (as Jonathon does) that the outright invalidation of software patents isn’t the answer and could hurt innovation, but I think continuing down the software patent road in any form at this point in time is a recipe for disaster. In my mind the patent system came out of the manufacturing world and was simply never designed to protect things like software ideas and algorithms. It’s rediculous to say that this system is effective in any way today in the software world, and it’s naive to think that the patent system can somehow be reformed in a reasonable timeframe. The impending software patent disaster needs to be fixed now, and the only way to do it is to wipe the slate clean and start fresh. Which I believe likely means abandoning software patents altogether until we can figure out a better mechanism to protect software inventions.

It’s with great irony, then, that the day after Jonathon’s post in support of software patents that Sun looses a rediculous software patent lawsuit to Kodak over some stupid object concepts used in Java. Here’s the good part: Kodak now says it will seek, in the damages part of the trial, $1.06 billion in past royalties, which they calculate represents *half* of Sun’s operating profit from the sales of computer servers and storage equipment between January 1998 and June 2001.

Still think that supporting software patents, in any form, right here and now today in the real world is a good idea, Jon?

Software patents threaten to *stifle* a frightening amount of innovation, not protect it. So if Sun believes in innovation as it’s competitive weapon (those are your words Jonathon) then perhaps this will be the smack that wakens them from their IP dreamworld.

Update 07/10/04: According to news.com, Sun and Kodak settled for $92M. Less than $1.06B, but certainly not petty cash.