keeping simple

Category: business

  • The technology disconnect

    What it did was reinforce a point about the sociology of management: From cars to space shuttles, from offshore oil wells to nuclear reactors, the people who make the decisions are often out of step with the mechanical details.” – Mathew Wald, New York Times. 2014/06/09. We sell pretty complex software that synchronizes clocks of computers, down…

  • Back in the day

    This is an embarrassing confession when I think back on how little I knew and how much I thought I knew.  At the height of the dot-com/Linux boom, maybe 1999, picture a restaurant in Palo Alto, one of the favored business dinner, super expensive, not-so-great Italian ones they have in the Valley. A group of…

  • Heartbleed and open source

    The Heartbleed bug was caused by a business model error. When we were in the real-time software business, our best customer was an old line manufacturing business that wanted to make sure before they qualified us as a vendor that we were making a profit from selling software to them. They did not want to…

  • Economics of Free Software

    Fate has made me the “money guy” for OpenSSL so I’m going to talk about that for a bit. As has been well reported in the news of late, the OpenSSL Software Foundation (OSF) is a legal entity created to hustle money in support of OpenSSL. By “hustle” I mean exactly that: raising revenue by…

  • At issue in Apple versus Samsung patent fight

    A system and method causes a computer to detect and perform actions on structures identified in computer data. The system provides an analyzer server, an application program interface, a user interface and an action processor. The analyzer server receives from an application running concurrently data having recognizable structures, uses a pattern analysis unit, such as…

  • Patent Reform modest proposal.

    Companies over a certain size should be required to show that they have evaluated a patent claim from a small entity in good faith. That is, if they get a claim that they are infringing, they should be required to show in court that they looked at it seriously and tried to find out if…

  • Paying for music

    Streaming services rely on a weird conceit, but it’s not a new one. Like record labels, these companies can’t exist—they literally have no product—without musicians. Yet hardly any musicians are pleased with the advent of digital streaming, and understandably so—they were already screwed by greedy record labels back when people went into actual brick-and-mortar stores…

  • I just don’t know what to say

  • What are patents for

    Mr. R.J. Hall designed a new product known as a “Towel Tote” that is basically an absorbent scarf with pockets on the ends.  [See one here]. After filing his design patent application, Hall e-mailed with Mr. Farley Nachemin at Bed Bath & Beyond (BB&B) to see whether the company would retail his product.  Nachemin is a VP…

  • Free Software Patents: Alan Cox

    1. A method, comprising: storing, by one or more processors, confidential data in a confidential section of virtual memory, wherein storing the confidential data in the confidential section of virtual memory comprises: mapping the confidential section of virtual memory to an address space in a first physical memory device; storing the confidential data in the…