FYI everyone, I let Frederic at ReadWriteWeb know that there was some interest from Wikimedians about Wave integration, and he kindly linked<http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_wave_our_first_hands-on_impressions.php>to a sample of the thread in his post about his impressions after a demo. The unfortunate side is that his general impression is that it was more like super enahnced email/IM than wiki.
Steven Walling On Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 9:31 PM, Tim Starling <tstarl...@wikimedia.org>wrote: > Robert Rohde wrote: > > Assuming Google is intending to be "not evil" about this, I would > > guess the point of the intellectual property (e.g. patents and > > trademarks) is to prevent people from creating things that are called > > and/or identify themselves as Wave servers and yet don't conform to > > the communications protocol. And there is a reasonable point there. > > Regardless of what features and services a server might offer, it is > > still important that the underlying communications protocol be > > something that all parties can make sense of, otherwise your network > > gets bogged down in gibberish. > > > > Anyway, that's the optimistic interpretation. > > The optimistic interpretation is that it is what is called a > "defensive patent", and that they don't intend to enforce it at all. > The USPTO is notoriously bad at finding related work that doesn't come > up when they search their own patent database, so a defensive patent > can be useful to prevent similar patents being registered by > competitors. It may also be useful to strike down future patents in > court. > > Red Hat, for instance, have taken this approach: > https://www.redhat.com/legal/patent_policy.html > > Some people have suggested that Wikimedia should register some > defensive patents, although they probably didn't realise how much time > and money is involved in registering and maintaining the things. > > -- Tim Starling > > > _______________________________________________ > foundation-l mailing list > foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l > _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
