There has been an intense debate on the Drools and jBPM blog with two posts by Mark Proctor http://blog.athico.com/2011/11/decision-model-ip-trap.html and http://blog.athico.com/2011/12/decision-model-ip-trap-part-deux.html.
At the same time another intense debate on the TDM patent was going on in “The Decision Model” Linkedin group. Mark saw fit to place of copy of the complete discussion thread, of a closed Linkedin group, on his public website against what I feel is the spirit of a closed Linkedin group of which he is a member.
Personally I respect Mark’s contributions to the open source community, the recent software patent that he was awarded (US Patent 7904402) and his significant contributions to the Drools project at Red Hat. And whilst Mark has sought to interpret some of my arguments in the Linked discussions as trying to “belittle him” this was not my intention.
It is not my intention in this post to provide a point-by-point rebuttal of all Mark’s arguments. What I hope to do is to outline the central plank of Mark’s arguments and that is his position on software patents, and, then look at some of the key arguments he has used to support his assertion that The Decision Model IP is a trap.
The world can be divided in to three groups, from a patent perspective; those who believe passionately that software patents should be abolished; those who believe that software patents should or will continue to exist, and, those who do not care either way.
Now Mark believes passionately that software patents should not exist. He also believes that until the day where software patents are abolished world-wide that the only people who have the moral right to own patents are open source software companies who will naturally use their patents defensively. Because they are open source companies.
There is nothing wrong in Mark holding this passionate belief.