Techstrong Gang – November 18, 2024

Hey everyone, it's Monday. We're sort of still here. You are not either.

Are we really? You're watching Text Drunk Gang. Hey everyone.

Happy Monday morning. It's Alan Shimel for Techstrong and uh, Techron Gang. We are wrapping, if you couldn't tell, we're still here in Salt Lake City.

It's a little quiet out on the floor here. It's the last day of Q Con and we're giving you our wrap up as Textron Gang today. By the time you watch this, God willing, we'll all be back home.

I'll be in a warmer climate and, uh, enjoying the sun. Not so for you, Mitchell. Oh, no, you might enjoy the sun.

It's sunny in Colorado. It's, we a little bit, you know, it's, it changes all the time, Colorado. Yeah.

Well, haven't looked at the weather report, but I don't think we, you know, let's face it there. A lot of people in Colorado are very high. It is high and, and they don't, it's high.

They can't even look at the, you don't meet the weather report. I'll be in Las Vegas this week Actually. You're gonna be in Las Vegas.

That's right. I'm in Las Vegas, actually. Oh, Alright.

Right. So, So you both, you're both at OpenText world. Yeah.

Oh, all right. So if you're in OpenText world, look for these two guys. If you don't know them, the guy here on my right, Mike Ard, chief content officer, tech Drunk Gang member.

And here on my left, Mitch Ashley, CTO, future VP Analyst. And as they said, they'll both be at OpenText. So, looking at this week, guys, you know, we've, we've done some wrap up on our thoughts on CubeCon and what with some of the trends, but there was one thing in particular, Mike, that you brought up, and, and it didn't, that you brought it up.

It was like the lead off thing from Jim Zalin on, on the keynote stage. No, it wasn't Jim, it was Chris, wasn't it Chris? No, it was Jim.

It was Jim, yeah. Patent trolls. Yum.

And you know, you, you, you, it, it kind of struck you, uh, tell us. It surprised me. I'm not sure it was a conversation that resonated with the audience, but the fact that they let off the conference, you know, suggest that where there's a, perhaps a little smoke, there's some fire going on here.

Um, the issue seems to be that a lot of the contributions that go into these projects, maybe we didn't vet that closely, and somebody did have a patent for this, and the trolls are now making some claims. And the CNCF is looking for some help from the community to identify prior art that will invalidate some of those pat patents, because they may be a patent that somebody acquired these trolls go out and get a patent, and they don't really care that much. Whether the patent is actually valid.

They're just trying to extort some money. But you're the legal eagle, you know how this works. Yeah, no.

If it was up to me, I'd have capital punishment for Pat and Charles, I'd them one warning of 15 to 25. And then after that, an injection. Well, what, what hand did you type with?

Which fingers did you type with? Right. But, you know, let, let's look at it.

You mentioned a few things there about prior use, term of art and stuff like that. The deal with patent trolls is, is typically they are the classic nuisance. They want to charge you just enough or just not enough where it's worth your while to go to court and call 'em on it and make them fight.

It's the go away paper, Right? It's a go. It's the nuisance payment.

And, and the question is how much is a nuisance worth? And for bigger companies, nuisances might be more money than for smaller companies. But many smaller companies are not set up.

They don't have in-house counts, so they're not gonna go fight these things. And if it's 5, 10, 20 grand, I'll pay it and move on. The idea with these patent trolls, they come in two flavors.

There's some patent trolls who actually see something that's not been patented, and they actually put in the time and effort to get a patent out of our patent office for a particular, you know, thing to do for a particular patentable type of function or what have you. That could take two to five years. Yeah.

And it's rather expensive. And then They go and enforce it once they Right. And then we go and enforce it.

Then there are just patent troll farms who go out and buy on, you know, patents that haven't been enforced in a while, but are still valid, and then go out and enforce these patents they buy. And those are the real patent trolls that quite frankly, chopping off a few fingers isn't justice. A 22 to the back of the head would be fine.

Um, Okay. But that being said, what you'll find in most of these patents, who's to blame the US Patent and Trademark Office? Because they're an overworked, underpaid entity in the bowels of some government building somewhere.

And what did they know about the final points of web assembly language or Kubernetes and container management? People submit patents. They look, if anyone else has a similar patent, they don't have the time to do the due diligence, even though it takes years to get a patent.

And then they grant people a patent. That probably is not valid. If you look at prior use and stuff like that.

And, and off these folks go to the, you know, playing the lottery of our legal system and nuisances, you know, There's a key word we haven't used yet, which is prior art. You know, it's not black and white. Uh, is this the same thing as that?

Uh, it's like in music, right? Did you rip off the song to write your song? Right?

Well, every, every song's got four chords and you know Mm-Hmm. In the Lord or whatever, every country song. Um, so, so it's, it's, there's lots of shades of gray, which is where they operate in, where they think they can Well, They Claim there's gray Look, the fact of the matter is, I think the overwhelming majority of the patent claims would fail if you actually took it to trial.

Right? You went through the process, but they count on you doing the nuisance thing. And, you know, you look around, again, we spoke about it yesterday.

There's 150, 200 small stands here, up and down this whole thing. How many of these companies are gonna pay an attorney 50 grand or more to go to trial, a hundred grand to go to trial when they could buy out for 10 grand or 15 grand? And that's what these trolls count on.

I didn't see the main stage conversation with Jim when he talked at the analyst press event, talk about the same thing. What I heard, the two strong messages were one validation we've arrived. Unfortunately, this is a, a form of showing that we've arrived if they're coming after us.

The other is that, um, Linux Foundation and CNCF will stand, stand behind it. We're gonna fight it. It's not, we're not gonna roll over on this stuff.

And so we're putting these programs and all, all the things together. Yeah. But it was kind of a, a little bit of a badge of honor that, you know, don't want to have to deal with this.

But this says that we've, we're doing some good things here. You know, all good intentions aside there. Um, I'm looking at this going, let me get this straight.

So you're gonna give somebody a T-shirt because they helped you thwart a billion dollar lawsuit. And I think maybe the reward system's not quite, They're kinda like a bug bounty. Um, no, but, but you wanna know, look.

Alright, so that's set in a dial. But the idea of banding together, right? This is, you know, but this is like the cyber insurance company saying, don't pay the ransomware.

Mm-hmm. Right. The idea of banding together these companies and when the patent trail comes for one, you come for all of us and we're gonna band together and hire an attorney or law firms that just deal with this crap.

And we we're paying them anyway. So you want to, you know, you want to go to war, get, bring, you better bring lawyers, guns and money. A flavor of nato, right?

Yeah. And, and banding together a community Yeah. Of Thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of users who can cite prior use, which make no mistake is the kryptonite.

Mm-Hmm. Of these patent haws. Mm-Hmm.

So aren't we exploiting a legal system here that makes it just too expensive to litigate? And now we're just Saying, so let me tell you what the answer there is. Mm-Hmm.

And unfortunately, our courts don't have the kes to do what needs to be done. I would make them take me to court on the patent litigation and I would ask for punitive damages, legal fees, time and expense if the patent troll loses. So you want patent troll, let's put some skin in the game and watch these guys fold up like the cheap suits they are and crawl back under the rocks they come from.

Okay. What can be done to make the patent office better? Money, Money, Money and resources.

I mean, you, you, you know, these aren't patent toter. First of all, there was a time Thomas Edison time where you may not, you didn't have to be a nuclear scientist. There weren't too many nuclear scientists in there.

Well, there was, there was Neils boar, you know, those Rutherford, those guys. But, um, back then, you didn't have to necessarily be such a specialist in any given discipline to understand what these patents were about. But today, I mean, you know, if you're not a cloud native expert, if you don't understand how a microservices architecture works Mm-Hmm.

Or the underpinnings of how modern routing tables work and all, you know, name it. How do you know it's new? You know, it's not been seen before me.

You don't, you don't know. You don't even know. I mean, it might as well be written in Chinese or Greek.

So part of it is getting people, specialists in the patent office who work on patterns in specific areas. We know that takes money. Right.

You, you don't think those people are available for, you know, $80,000 year job, 20 years in retirement, government salary. I mean, come on. What's the matter with that?

No, I mean, you know, I, I, no, I mean, are we gonna overhaul the patent system? I doubt it. No.

Well, look, this was something like Brad fell, this was near and dear to him for years, right? For a while companies said, I I'm not gonna patent patent. Right.

That companies shouldn't do patents. I I have an answer. What's your answer?

My answer is to put all the patents in the big giant LLM and then that makes it easier to find which patents are actually similar. And perhaps we can use that technology to help us fight the fight Long as it doesn't bate. Yeah.

But no, but so that'll take care of 10% because most times, times it's not the com the, the troll who comes after you is not saying your patent is invalid. My patent is older than your patent. No, you don't have a patent.

I do. That's the majority of the cases. So an LLM of all the patents would not help you in that case 'cause you're not a patent holder.

Well, also, how much of it is really about the Patent? How much of it is about the threat of lawsuit money? Right.

You know, there's that, It's the game of chicken. It's exactly what it is. At some point it becomes really about the patent.

But in the beginning it's not. I think you could have all the patents in an LLM and then you could have a massive database of software, especially if the CNCF has the, owns the code for all these things and just compare the two. And then you could just start invalidating patents.

Have you ever read read patents? Yeah. You, you, that's, I don't even think AI could take a patent and match it to a, how a project is being used.

It's a very specific way They're written patent. Yeah. They're, so It's our friend Louis wrote how many patents?

Yes, yes. IBM And VMware. And how many, they're so obscure obscurely written and hazed in, in, yeah.

I, it's just impossible to do to major. It's impossible. I think it's worth the research effort.

And I think the CNCF and the Lennox Foundation should go fund that thing with all their various vendor partners. I, I, you know, a better thing might be to, and I've seen this, you know, bandied about over the years, is have something like, um, you know, a, a first use library, if you will, right? For every patent that's out there, have a have a committee that hunts out first use.

And if you could document that first use prior to the issuance of the patent, you have two choices. You could go have an in-house law firm that then goes to have that patent invalidate, or just wait for the patent troll, you know, to come out from behind the rack and play whack-a-mole. I don't think, I don't think the Linox Foundation's business is solving the patent problem.

I mean, Well, when you, Like, you're gonna contain it, right? And you're, you have the risk of something really does happen that, that that is deemed violation and goes to court or whatever. And then there's bigger risk to it.

But it's, it's a risk you manage in a cost, right? Yeah. I mean, if you get to the point where people won't use open source software 'cause too many people are having to pay or going to court, that's a different issue.

But I don't think you, you overreact. Don't over rotate it on it yet. Do we need to be more circumspect about the code that we do contribute to these open source projects?

'cause a lot of times people are, you know, they're enthusiastic, but they're not legal eagles and they're not checking to see whether or not this thing that they've created is actually violating some batten Well, they may have taken an idea, they did it, you know, at work and said, I'm gonna kind of use that same idea here. Am I open source project? It's okay.

It's open source, right? Mm-Hmm. So it, It, so now you're talking about something differently, right?

This is where you actually, there's a valid patent and, and are people entitled to be compensated for their patent? Yeah. That, that's okay.

But I, I don't think that's a majority of these cases. I don't even think it's a decent minority. I think that's a sliver.

Oh, isn't it? A rare exception. One of these, it's a sliver.

A sliver. Especially at a big companies. I mean, it's, it's also the size of who they're going after.

You know, if they're going after Comcast or IBM or Apple, they're gonna get the world thrown at 'em and Right. You know, like, yeah, I can outlast you patent troll. No.

Yeah. com and you know, we're, you know, like, okay, please don't put us out of business. Right, Right, right.

com who like, Hey, my business is getting customers to use my software widget. Yeah. I don't have time to play the legal eagle beagle game.

Exactly. This, This sounds like a form of ambulance, Jason. It Oh, it absolutely is.

Let me just tell you something on the wrong of legal trash. Ambulance chasing is way ahead, way ahead, way above the patent, Charles. Mm I I'll just say that.

Ambulance chases serve a purpose in, in society. Mm-Hmm. I'm not sure what that purpose is, But They're certainly above the lowly patent.

Sho I I think it's to keep our insurance rates higher. That's what I figured. I'm gonna pull a guy Curry.

What? What are we talking about? Well, we came back to an ambulance chasing look what they do.

It's not to keep your insurance. It rates, rates high. It's not to keep your insurance rates high.

If it wasn't for the ambulance chasers, we wouldn't have safe products. We wouldn't have seat belts in cars or airbags or, or we wouldn't have all these defective child you'd be driving, Driving for Pintos and Yeah, we'd be driving Pintos in gremlins. Yeah.

I liked the gremlin. You like, of course there memory. I was in the of Corsair would be nice.

We got gremlins and trolls now. This is good. It's Pretty darn good.

Pretty darn good. All right, last thoughts on CubeCon fellas. I enjoy this show and I keep coming back 'cause there's things to learn here and it is one of the best places where some of the best minds in this business are here for three days.

And that's joy. And so I would recommend everybody to come to, you know, cube Con. I mean, you know, I know you wanna have it restructured, but yeah, it's still the best show in town.

There is an attraction. Yeah. People wanna be part of something that come, they don't go 'cause their boss sent them, right.

No, they can't. No. This is still a high buzz event.

Yeah. Mm-Hmm. Totally is.

They wanna be part of the community. There's a community to it. I think for me, for us it's a great place to get a kind of, a center of gravity is happening for a little while and you kind of see where things are going, what people are thinking, you know, and, and some shows you don't get that.

No. It's just kind of a vendor community and nothing wrong with that, but you don't hear necessarily where people are trying to go, go with their products or the market, et cetera. Here you get a really strong sense of what's happening.

Yeah. So I love it. It is a fire hose though, right?

Absolutely. And you come here. Oh, absolutely.

And there's just so much tech running around. Whereas when you go to a, a single vendor show, you know, it's usually within a finite set of tech that you're dealing with. But here man, it's quite like you're bouncing from one thing to the next and it's just like, holy crap.

Yep. Agreed. Agreed.

How about you agreed. Um, I love it. I I think it's still a high energy show.

I just wish they'd make it a little more user friendly. Lower Altitude. Is that too much to ask?

No, I don't mind being high. Okay. You always gotta go there.

You always gotta, you always gotta go there. Alright. We tried to do an Andy Wiener.

Yeah. Okay. Yes, exactly.

All right. You've got a tick on Me as, as the bartender says Last call. Last Call.

You don't have to go home, but you can stay here. Stay Here. We'll see you in London at the next Q Con.

This is Alan Hummel. On behalf of Mitch Ashley, Mike Ard, we hope you've enjoyed our Q Con coverage. We got a full day of text drunk TV coming at you, as well as I will probably be live at OpenText, right?

We are sending a video crew, so stay tuned for that all this week. But for now, we're outta here. Everyone.

Take care.