[cap-talk] Academic and patent disconnect - rant, taocp

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

On Thu, 2008-03-13 at 14:02 -0700, Jed Donnelley wrote:

> What outraged me was this statement in
> the above paper from 1979:
> __________
> "Most previous work on software portability has focused
> on problems of porting programs over different
> operating systems as well as different hardware. To our
> knowledge, this is the first time an entire system has
> been designed for portability."
> ___________
> 
> By 1979 the LTSS system at LLNL had already been
> running as a portable high level language system
> for about 13-14 years...

Yeah. Those guys were completely oblivious about UNIX too. The PWB
version was release in July of 1977, and by that point the darn thing
was running on a whole bunch of architectures. Much -- maybe most -- of
the motivation for using C was portability.

> B.  In the patent area, consider this one...

>From the abstract, they appear to be claiming to have re-invented MxN
threading, but that was a well established idea by then. Very early
versions of EROS did that in 1991, and I certainly did not consider it a
novel approach then. Publicly available versions of EROS had a stable
implementation of MxN threading with capacity reserve scheduling circa
1997.

But you have to be careful with patents. The abstract and the text
description of the reduction to practice aren't the patent. The only
part of a patent that is legally significant is the claims section, and
without analyzing that in detail it is very hard to know what novelty is
being claimed and whether any novelty in fact exists.


In spite of this, I reluctantly agree that any correlation between
academia and scholarship is an allegedly intended but in practice
accidental effect.

For a while, at least, computer science academia acknowledged the
importance and relevance of industrial advances in what is fundamentally
an engineering field. Unfortunately, this regrettable and embarrassing
form of academic heresy didn't turn out to be catching, and CS seems to
be slowly joining the academic parade on this point.

There are some deep scholars to be found in academia, and there are
academics who understand, respect, and cherish the interface between
academia and practice. Some academic researchers even have the temerity
to pursue fundamental research. More power to all of them.

But my advice to any young academic is that in most academic
institutions such skills, views, and intentions are best kept safely
hidden until after tenure has been secured.


shap