Netflix sues Broadcom's VMware over US virtual machine patents

reuters.com

52 points·blackeyeblitzar··6 comments

> The ’893 Patent is entitled “Starting up at least one virtual machine in a physical machine by a load balancer.”

They are coming for the whole interw3bz.

"A system has plural physical machines that contain virtual machines. A load balancer receives a request from a client. In response to the request, it is determined whether at least one additional virtual machine should be started up. In response to determining that at least one additional virtual machine should be started up, the load balancer sends at least one command to start up the at least one additional virtual machine in at least one of the physical machines."

I can't imagine they'd have the balls to take on Amazon. Biting the hand that feeds them, and all that.

That probably is a patent that shouldn't exist and probably not a sensible innovation either. Not saying that Netflix technical solutions aren't great. What isn't great is their legal department. They might want to reinvest its costs into other departments like engineering.

The patents have some arcane descriptions in the lawsuit:

> "System and method for attributing to a corresponding virtual machine CPU usage of a domain in which a shared resource’s device driver resides"

> "System and method for attributing CPU usage of a virtual machine monitor to a corresponding virtual machine."

> "Starting up at least one virtual machine in a physical machine by a load balancer."

Be that as it may, patents here absolutely fail to provide their intended purpose. This is a legal system that is run off course.

Dupes:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42502812

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42509357

Software parents are cancer of computer science

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