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	Thursday, March 13, 2003

This post (and this weblog) has a new home. WS-Confusion To complement the Web Services Reliable Messaging specification currently in-progress in OASIS, Microsoft, IBM, BEA, and TIBCO just released WS-ReliableMessaging.  (The WS-Addressing specification is in the same salvo, presumably to supply unambiguous identification of endpoints for the purpose of tracking acknowledgements.)  The OASIS version (which I mentioned earlier in my weblog) was initially publicized as "WS-Reliability". The OASIS version is backed (in terms of initial committee membership) by Hitachi, Fujitsu, WebMethods, Sonic Software, NEC, Oracle, IONA, SeeBeyond, WRQ, SAP, and Sun.  The other version is backed (in terms of authorship) by IBM, Microsoft, BEA, and TIBCO. The kicker in the Microsoft/IBM/TIBCO version is, as expected: EXCEPT FOR THE COPYRIGHT LICENSE GRANTED ABOVE [to reproduce the specification document], THE AUTHORS DO NOT GRANT, EITHER EXPRESSLY OR IMPLIEDLY, A LICENSE TO ANY INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY, INCLUDING PATENTS, THEY OWN OR CONTROL. (OASIS has some more reasonable IP terms.)  At any rate, I'm not sure what "intellectual property" IBM/Microsoft/TIBCO could possibly be referring to (other than potentially spurrious patents), since sequence numbers, acknowledgements, endpoint identification, and timeouts are part of more messaging and communications protocols in the network domain, Internet domain (SMTP), and business domain (HL7, EDI, EDI-INT, etc.) than I could count. 3:55:30 PM

This post (and this weblog) has a new home. Patent-Oriented Programming A recent patent granted to Xerox that includes aspect-oriented programming among its claims has provoked some interesting responses: I guess giving away Ethernet and the Mac UI was enough... [Don Box's Spoutlet] In spite of the width of the patent's claims, I have the hope and expectation that those claims and their scope will actually protect the technique as opposed to restricting it.  Among other things, Xerox released AspectJ first under the Mozilla Public License 1.1 and then under the Common Public License ("CPL") 1.0.  The relevant portion of the CPL 1.0 would be: "Licensed Patents " mean patent claims licensable by a Contributor which are necessarily infringed by the use or sale of its Contribution alone or when combined with the Program. 2. GRANT OF RIGHTS [...] b) Subject to the terms of this Agreement, each Contributor hereby grants Recipient a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free patent license under Licensed Patents to make, use, sell, offer to sell, import and otherwise transfer the Contribution of such Contributor, if any, in source code and object code form. This patent license shall apply to the combination of the Contribution and the Program if, at the time the Contribution is added by the Contributor, such addition of the Contribution causes such combination to be covered by the Licensed Patents. The patent license shall not apply to any other combinations which include the Contribution. No hardware per se is licensed hereunder. So, as long as Xerox is a Contributor toward AspectJ, the CPL covers the royalty-free use of the patent within AspectJ.  (Unfortunately, this sort of thing is not covered in the CPL 1.0 FAQ.) 3:46:25 PM