Hello I've reviewed some of the patents and I was amused by what passes for a 'patent'.
http://www.google.co.uk/patents/US5978594 This patent is all about agents running on hosts, controlled by a central service. It is described as "novel", but it's not something invented by BMC and is present in many other products. For example, both IBM Websphere and Oracle Weblogic have a concept of a central service (WAS deployment manager, WL admin server), that feeds instructions/configuration to nodes running JVMs. This is not novel - it's common place. http://www.google.com/patents/US6816898 Collecting performance metrics. I can do that in a couple of lines of Python and it's nothing new. A typical large bank will have lots of this stuff, both purchased and home grown, littered on their networks with an "operations team" constantly monitoring it. http://www.google.co.in/patents/US6895586 This one is awful. It sounds like BMC claim to have invented a system of storing data in a hierarchical document using namespaces - you know, what we commonly refer to as XML. There's no intellectual property in designing a schema. http://www.google.co.uk/patents/US7062683 This patent seems to suggest BMC have invented a method of troubleshooting via flowcharts - something I recall doing at school in the mid-80s, and I recall plenty being present in my 6502 Assembler guide. I suspect this and other patent relates to the way in which a BMC product works, but copying the concept is not a crime (Microsoft do not own the concept of a word processor, or sending an email). Indeed, for every concept pinched by a competitor, BMC will have pinched one themselves - such as graphing data to display metrics, which is almost certainly patented by some other company. I think the core problem with many IT patents is they aren't actually 'inventions' but a great way for lawyers to make money. After all, they are hardly going to turn around and tell a BMC senior manager, "I'm sorry mate, but this patent has no value". Real inventions, such as James Dyson's bag-less vacuum cleaner, have real value. These patents seem to tell a competitor more about how the internals of a BMC product works rather than defining an 'invention' of real value. John Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, but I can use Google :) _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org "Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years"
