Bilski's growing up, and smacking down some bad software patents (opensource.com)

Posted Jul 19, 2011 17:39 UTC (Tue) by mikov (guest, #33179)
In reply to: Bilski's growing up, and smacking down some bad software patents (opensource.com) by k8to
Parent article: Bilski's growing up, and smacking down some bad software patents (opensource.com)

That is completely beside the point. I don't care if Florian Mueller is being paid to lobby. What matters is the content of his post and its factual accuracy. After all you don't know my motivation for posting either and I don't know yours - any of us could be paid in theory, or coerced, etc - it is counterproductive and pointless to even speculate on that. We all have motivations - it is not just an abstract intellectual pursuit.

I find his posts and his blog informative and interesting (if quite depressing). I don't automatically accept them as axiomatic truth and neither should you or anybody else. But to denounce them based on (unfounded) speculation that he is paid to lobby is ... wrong.

In this specific case he is rightly pointing out that Red Hat could perhaps be doing more to fight patents. But Red Hat is a for profit company, they are not a free software crusader.

It is actually kind of sad that we have to rely on big business to lobby for something that is intuitively right. We are all screwed.

Bilski's growing up, and smacking down some bad software patents (opensource.com)

Posted Jul 20, 2011 0:06 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]

In this case its difficult to access factual accuracy. He's made a claim about trending on case law based on his own personal review of recent court cases. However he doesn't go the extra mile to cite the list of cases from which he draws his trending conclusion.

Tiller, on the other hand actually provides us with a link to a 118 page pdf document which does a detailed analysis by 3rd parties lawyers that we can all read on our own and then can draw our own conclusions from. is the 118 page report valid analysis? Are Tiller's conclusions drawn from the analysis a reasonable interpretation? Would any of us draw starkly different conclusions from the same report than Tiller does? Is the report missing something crucial bit of analysis or data? 182 cases sounds like a lot, but hey maybe they are the wrong 182 cases to use as a sample to base trending on.

These are the sort of questions we can answer for ourselves once we read the report. Questions FM hasn't made an effort to ask or answer. All we know is he's done his own unpublished analysis of recent court cases and he has an opinion. FM hasn't providing any factual information to the table which would call into question the analysis of the 182 cases in the report. He's editorializing to make his own points about Red Hat's behavior in a larger context.

Regardless of whether or not one is paid to have an opinion, constructive discussion about the trend in question needs published methodology and analysis or we will never get past perceived agendas and talking points.

I can't fault FM for persistence on the points he cares about, but I can fault him for failing to actually speak to the contents of the specific report in question that Tiller is holding up for us. Nor has FM or brought missing information into the public record that he feels the report is lacking. That's a shame. if anyone is going to blow credibility holes in that report, FM would be the person to do it. I certainly don't want to get my hopes up based on poor analysis. But I expect much more than "my own unpublished personal review of recent cases" as a counter argument.

Though in all fairness to FM, we should probably ask the authors of the report that Tiller bases his article on, if they have ever been contracted to represent Red Hat in a patent dispute. Hopefully they won't refuse to answer that question.

-jef