Judge Orders Facebook to Release Source Code
gigaom.com
gigaom.com
Their platform "specs" are so widespread and so far ranging, it has every HPC acronym thrown at it. They even specify bits of the BIOS and EPROMs.
Who are these morons and why do they think FB is nothing but intuitive development dictated by growth and everyday contact with a huge user base? Anybody who is anybody would have come up with distributed caching of RDBMs queries, didn't someone implement Memcached at LiveJournal? and the rest of it is self-dictating.
Can you imagine being the FB engineers tasked with developing a platform for applications? the last thing you want to read are patents; they're mostly medieval sketches, and arm-chair monday-morning quarterback-engineering that you don't want your mental model cluttered with this crap. Instead, you poach competent people from your competitors (i.e. people who don't have the time to lay patent mines for posterity and instead have shit to do today)
A platform for managing information? get fucked!
Patents are so controversial and stifling. It's sickening to observe such hypocritical behaviour but, for example, my employer doesn't allow their employees reading patent texts (at least during work hours, IIRC) in fear of provable infringement -- yet they apply for patents themselves whenever they can, apparently just for defensive purposes!
How much more actual, productive work could we do if we didn't have to keep the best of our people writing documents for patent applications, occupying their minds with such frivolous patent games while still working our arses off to make a difference in the real world?
Most of them seem to describe very common technologies on the web. I don't know how any of them get enforced. I guarantee there is some kind of patent out now for "an interface (possibly a website) that allows users to post messages (possibly comments or urls) to a group and use a signal (possibly voting) to indicate preference (possibly up or down)."
The patent system is about as broken as it gets, I'm on the swing with regards to what to do about it, abolish it completely or overhaul it.
I also think there ought to be a strict rule that if you hold a patent you have to market a product within a year of receiving your patent that uses your patented stuff in an essential way.
After that is open season for everybody to improve upon that patent, everybody wins.
The rest is bureaucracy or just plain bad intention.