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,
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 &
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