Sunk by 'patent troll': Iron Speed director asks 'anyone want to buy us?' Iron Speed, a firm which provided a rapid application development tool for creating .NET apps, is shuttering itself thanks to "litigation with a patent troll", according to a letter sent to customers by co-founder and chairman Alan Fisher. The Iron Speed designer enabled developers to create applications for web, cloud and …
Actually it pre-dates that, CASE tools first surfaced in the 70s and work with things like COBOL/CICS.
I remember TI (they of dodgy chips fame) had some bloated behomoth of a CASE tool known as IEF.
And actually Gupta and PB had their own DB engine while Delphi used a connector to any data source you could need. None of them actually generated code or even mappings for data bindings. They just speeded up development.
O and sorry to be picky but Delphi is 3GL not a 4GL :)
If you want to get rid of patent trolls, tie the damages they can claim to the amount of product sales they generate. After all, only those actually selling product are "damaged" by infringement.
Patent trolls sell nothing, they just sit on their patents and wait for a juicy target. Since they sell nothing, the damages awarded will be a multiple of . . zero.
Poof ! Instant disappearance of the issue.
If, as looks to be the case, that most patent trolls are accommodated under a bridge somewhere in North America, wouldn't it be logical to sell your product to the rest of the world and exclude North America?
In practise the American market would still be able to buy the product, by telling porkies about whether they come from the land of the free for all or not, or get it through a third party that by some quirk of international trade, deftly manages to make no money.
The trolls would find most other countries patent offices staffed with higher life forms than amoeba, and thus, not being able to bring a case against a product that doesn't trade in the jurisdiction of the patent, will have nowhere to go except the ditch where they will be found face down and unresponsive.
as looks to be the case, that most patent trolls are accommodated under a bridge somewhere in North America,
Once we find that bridge, I suggest an airstrike with tactical nukes. It's only way to be sure. However, there's a certain place in Texas, but it would require multiple strategic nukes to get them all.
I looked up the patent at issue here. It is: https://www.google.com/patents/US7062502
It's not pretty, but at 108 pages, it's not the cursory marketing shite many trolls are advancing. And the patent actually started its life at what appears to be a real (though probably now defunct) company: http://www.appquest.com/
Unfortunately, (i) the claims are incredibly broad, covering the general idea of database->software generation. All too commonly permitted by the USPTO. And (ii) a troll is suing developers of the general idea rather than developing the more specific ideas from the patent. How does that encourage innovation?
"the claims are incredibly broad" Aye, there's the rub. We were sued by an NPE, as they call trolls now. Despite boatloads of prior art thrown at them, they persisited. We settled because we couldn't afford to litigate. Fortunately for us, rhe troll also sued some very big blokes, who took it to trial, won on non-infringement, and freed us from the licence. But the patents are still valid and the troll is still suing.
Big companies knowingly infringe patents awarded to small companies too - see Dyson v Hoover 2001, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/954623.stm. Limiting damages to the revenue damage caused to the small business would encourage big companies to infringe patents. The process of proper patent examination is a lot less expensive than litigation - it should be made possible for a patent examiner with some legal training to adjudicate on the validity of a patent troll's patent and dismiss it before it ever gets to court.
Ironspeed should release the source code immediately. Once the open source community has it - it will live on but no patent troll will be able to go after it - there won't be "anyone" to go after!
Also, how does this crappy patent not apply to ORM tools like Entity Framework or Hibernate? You can point them at databases and create Object Relation Mappings - which is exactly what Ironspeed did under the hood?
It is very unfortunate. If possible keep a payment gateway to receive fees in case if anybody is interested in the product, even if they use a cracked version of it. Hope they understand, if they want to paint, they need a wall also along with the paint and a brush.
Are you not considering to relocate your business outlet to another country where you are free to develop and continue to support the needy. (idea: Mr. Arnold)
Good luck.
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