Wireless email mania

l am traveling this week and decided that I would not bring my laptop. I wanted to see if I could live with my Axim X51v PPC. I will blog about that later, however this entry was written with Calligrapher 8.2 and Pocket Word. 

In the continuing saga of the wireless patent infringement lawsuits, the U.S. Justice Department urged a federal judge last Wednesday to refrain from any plans to shut the BlackBerry service until the government gets more assurances its users will be exempted.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office rejected all of the claims of an NTP Inc. patent at the heart of an infringement case that threatens to shut down BlackBerry email service. Although the decision is not final, it will probably prolong the proceedings.

This week Visto filed a lawsuit against Good Technology, a maker of mobile email communication software. This is in addition to the one already filed against Microsoft.

I am far from being a patent expert but as a software architect I don’t understand how this technology is even patentable. All wireless push email designs revolve around a software architecture pattern generally known as a heartbeat or keep alive message. A mobile device needs to send a signal to a server to let it know that it is available to receive data. This type of software architecture has been used for over 30 years to manage clusters of computers. Think DEC VAX clusters from the 80's.

This issue comes down to the process of patenting software algorithms. It looks to me as if the system is broken. As I am trying to prove the point I ran across this excellent article in Slate by way of a Slashdot RSS feed (which brings up a whole other blog thought about how we get our news). The article was written by Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School and co-author of "Who Controls the Internet?". The article can be found at this link http://www.slate.com/id/2135559/?nav=tap3. Tim Wu provides a great explanation of the problem, unfortunately it seems that the only way to fix the problem is to have Congress legislate and we know how well that works.

While on the road with my Axim X51v using Exchange ActiveSync...