************************************* * * * DB/C Newsletter * * December 2004 * * * ************************************* News and Comments 2004 has been another successful year for DB/C Software Company. Vicki, Sean, Joe and I thank you very much for your continued support. We look forward to next year with plans for improvements to DB/C DX and DB/C FS. We have updated the Blowfish sample program that was described in the September 2003 DB/C Newsletter and which is found on the dbcsoftware.com web site. The updated program now includes a decryption function, and also now handles up to 64 byte blocks. Last month's newsletter stirred up some controversy. The status of the VMS operating system was one of the points of discussion. Readers took me to task for saying that VMS is "gone". I know VMS is still in use, but I stand by my comment. My response can be found in the dbctalk archives. HP recently announced that they are terminating their co-development of Itanium with Intel. Intel will be taking over the team of HP engineers. This is one more indication that HP is trying to become another Dell - create nothing new, but instead just manufacture commodity hardware using software developed and maintained by others. Bill Hewlett and David Packard would be very sad to know what has happened to their once innovative company. As long-time readers of this newsletter know, I'm very concerned about the patent system in the United States and Europe. Patents are just one part of the bigger concept commonly called intellectual property. This month's article is about the major changes that are occurring in this area. Happy holidays! don.wills@dbcsoftware.com ****************************************************************************** Intellectual Property Inflection Point Intellectual property comes in many forms - music, movies, software, books, databases, and designs of all sorts of things. Copyrights, patents, trade secrets and other methods are used to protect intellectual property from misappropriation. However, we are approaching an inflection point with regard to the economics of ownership of certain intellectual property. Because of technology advances in recent years, there has been a running conflict between the owners and consumers of music and movies. Owners of music and movies will continue to lose their battles as new technology makes it easier to copy and consume sights and sounds. With regard to software-based intellectual property, the economics and culture of mass market software like Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office are under attack on two fronts. The first is piracy. Software piracy is actually quite similar to music and movie piracy, although technical defenses are somewhat different. The second area of attack is the main point of this article. That point is this - the economics of the revenue model for certain software-based proprietary intellectual property is becoming a loser. On balance, it will become more advantageous for authors and owners of some software and designs to put that intellectual property into the public domain than to attempt to protect it from copying. More long-term net income will be generated by promoting public domain software and designs than will be generated by the traditional licensing revenue model. An example of this is the Power processor architecture that was created by IBM. IBM recently announced that the Power architecture will become an open standard which may be licensed at no cost by any company. A consortium of companies, led by IBM, will oversee continued development of this processor architecture. Information can be found at www.power.org. This is a big deal. The Power architecture is used today in the IBM pSeries computers (AIX/LINUX), the IBM eSeries (OS/400), Apple computers (Mac OS X), and various other devices. The next generation Sony Playstation (PS3) and Microsoft XBOX (XBOX2) will both be based on the Power architecture. Toshiba, Motorola, IBM and others currently manufacture chips based on the Power architecture. Other chip makers, including important Chinese companies, have now committed to using the Power architecture as the basis for many new products. Sun, which has generally been slow to embrace open source and free licensing, has just announced that Solaris 10 will be free and that source code for Java 6 will be openly published. It is just a matter of time before Sun moves Java, Solaris and other intellectual property (SPARC?) into the public domain. Here is a current line-up of some open/free intellectual property versus the proprietary counterpart: Power chip architecture vs. AMD/Intel x86 architecture Eclipse vs. Microsoft Visual Studio LINUX vs. Microsoft Windows and SCO UNIX OpenOffice and others vs. Microsoft Office For most technology breakthroughs, advancement initially happens quite rapidly. After the initial breakthrough, advances in the technology slow dramatically. This was true for cars, jet airplanes, telecommunications and, going back even further, the railroads. The same pattern will happen in software and computer design. As advances in the computer hardware and software industry slow, the economics will change. However, there is a big difference between physical things and intellectual property. Because there is zero manufacturing or duplication cost associated with intellectual property, the economics of a maturing computer industry will not be like the maturation of previous technologies and industries. That's why we're approaching an inflection point in the economics and stewardship of certain software and design intellectual property. Trying to guess the long-term effects of this are probably futile, but the changes will be profound for certain companies, products and markets. ****************************************************************************** DB/C DX Class Schedule Class: DB/C DX Fundamentals Date: February, 2005 Location: to be determined For information, send email to admin@dbcsoftware.com. ****************************************************************************** Subscribing to the DB/C Newsletter If you don't already have the DB/C Newsletter delivered to your email address and would like to have it emailed to you monthly, just send an email message to 'dbcnews-subscribe@dbcsoftware.com'. The newsletter will be delivered to the email address from which the message was sent.