Hacker News Reader

Comment by lemonade | Hacker News Reader

The original KSplice project was actually fully open source, funded by a Dutch charity called NLnet that funds lots of interesting projects like that. I've been running it ever since.

After this was all done the team got acquihired by Oracle. I was actually amazed that the team was allowed to keep the service up for some non-Oracle distro's.

But very happy to see a broader adoption of this kind of technology, it is essential for all these unmanned systems out there in the cloud that they can be patched whilst running.

View on HN

Any reason why no one forked KSplice when the original team went to Oracle?

Yes: KSplice had software patents - Oracle bought them. And everyone knows what Oracle is like with software patents: aggressive!

I'm not clear what they actually cover, and can't look them up right now, but I'd thought they were specific on how KSplice in particular operates, both applying hotpatches and analysing the source to create them. I don't know whether they'd apply to anything else, or whether there is prior art, but they're an obvious landmine to be aware of and to avoid. So a simple fork wouldn't do unless it'd change the way it actually worked. A fresh approach was needed, and we seem to have two fresh approaches here.

I'm trusting they've been avoided here. They probably have, as this is much more general? The concept of hot patches are of course fine, people have been doing that for decades, and you can't patent concepts.

The lesson here: please don't patent stuff jn your open-source software, in case you wake up one day and got acquihired by Evil™.

> The lesson here: please don't patent stuff jn your open-source software, in case you wake up one day and got acquihired by Evil™.

Or use a a license with a patent grant, like Apache 2.0 or GPL 3.

OK, I've now looked up the Ksplice patents that I know of. (I may not have found them all, but I think I probably have?) Here be dragons! (Those who are ordered not to read patents: Don't click on the links in this post.)

Of course the time they were granted (to Oracle, after Ksplice were bought) the applications became nigh-impenetrable patentese that really need a US-qualified patent attorney to interpret, so I'm absolutely not going to try and I'm just going to post what I found here.

Application: https://www.google.co.uk/patents/US20100269105 became patent https://www.google.co.uk/patents/US8612951 (B2) "Method of determining which computer program functions are changed by an arbitrary source code modification". (They've also cited a patent for a… coffeepot. OK, I'm pretty sure that bit's a typo. <g>)

Application: https://www.google.co.uk/patents/US20100083224 seems to have become patent https://www.google.co.uk/patents/US8261247 (B2) "Method of modifying code of a running computer program based on symbol values discovered from comparison of running code to corresponding object code".

Application: https://www.google.co.uk/patents/US20100269106 does not seem to have been granted directly, but then there's patent https://www.google.co.uk/patents/US8607208 "System and methods for object code hot updates" which I think is a continuation-in-part of it and oh I've gone cross-eyed, get a professional.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com