Of late patents around mobile technologies have been in the news. Four high
profile news items are (1) Oracle suing Google for Java patent violation, (2)
Apple and Samsung fighting each other in different parts of the world,
Microsoft, Apple, Rim and others jointly buying Nortel patent library for
$4.5 billion and (4) Google buys Motorola Mobile and gets 17,000 patents.
This is only the tip of the iceberg. This diagram from Reuters shows the
complex battlefield of mobile patent and significant portion of these patents
are for software.
In the sideline of this patent war, a debate has been raging about the
usefulness of the US patent law governing software patents. Point to note
here is that each country has a different patent law. For example, in India,
software per se cannot be patented.
If you want to have a quick look at what patenting is all about have a look
... (more)
Everybody acknowledges that IT has to plays a key role in any new service or
product design. Therefore, IT needs to align with business and be flexible to
changing business needs. It is a question of how to be agile rather than
should we be agile. Then, why is there such a gulf between the people who
evangelize agile processes and those who look at them with great suspicion?
Any application is built to satisfy a business goal. The process has two
major steps where the step one is to define the application behavior which
will help in meeting the business goal and the step two is to... (more)
To build and maintain applications required to reach out to you customer
through Mobile & Smart phone is expensive.
Why? Because of platform proliferation. Because of quick technology
obsolescence. (See this)
Management perception compounds the problem.
Anybody, not intimately familiar with this technical challenge, perceives
that the effort of developing a mobile application should be proportional to
the size of the screen. In other words, since mobile screen is much smaller
than a PC or a Laptop screen, the effort required for developing application
should also be proportiona... (more)
Do we need programming languages?
You may think that the answer is no. But, if you go by the recent trend you
may need to change your mind.
Why is Google working two (GO, DART) new programming languages? Why has IBM
(X10), Cray (Chapel) and Red Hat (Ceylon) working on creating a new
programming language of its own?
Why have the attendees of the QCon London have selected 5 (HTML5, DART,
Scala, Clojure, Node.js) new languages as the most important software
development trends for 2012? What does Neil McAllister mean when he says that
these 10 (DART, Ceylon, GO, F#, OPA, Fantom, Zim... (more)
If you are clear about what governance means then you can skip the next
section. However, if you have heard the term – Corporate Governance, SOA
Governance, IT Governance – but you are not exactly sure about what it
really means, then here is an explanation.
Suppose you are interested that an entity works in a way you want it to work.
If you are managing the entity then you have the necessity authority to
ensure it. However, you don’t manage the entity directly then what do you
do? To do anything you need to have some authority or influence over the
entity. You can discuss with ... (more)