Warren Seen

Tasmania is a small place, which is why I’m surprised that very few people in the IT industry here have heard of Morfik, a Hobart based development company. Reading this morning’s Read/Write Web however, things may be about change there. As reported by Richard, slashdot are running a post about the Morfik patent which appears to be aimed squarely at Google’s GWT.

I’m in two minds about this, as I always am about software patents. On the one hand, Morfik was clearly first to the party in terms of public release of a JavaScript compiler, according to the patent they had a provisional granted prior to the release of the GWT. On the other, I have to wonder how this is any different to the multitude of language translation techniques already out there, or at least whether it’s significantly inventive enough to pass the “not obvious to a practitioner in the field” test.

But hey, this wouldn’t be the first patent to be granted despite the obviousness of it to someone with half a brain. I mean, thank goodness the patent doesn’t mention Ruby, I guess that means RJS is safe!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007 at 9:40 am and is filed under java, javascript, patents, programming, ruby, ruby on rails. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.