My what big IP teeth open source has
When OSDL chief Stuart Cohen was in Atlanta last week one of the interesting things his luncheon companions heard was his view that the SCO case was actually a good thing.
It's certainly been a good thing for Palamida.
Palamida CEO Mark Tolliver (left) called from his car today on the way to the OSBC conference at San Francisco's Argent Hotel. As part of the company's conference prep work, he said, his company took a look at its IP compliance database.
"We found we now have 5.5 billion signatures, 300 million files, something like 9 million Java namespace names, approximately a 50% increase since the last time we looked, which was in the third quarter last year." It's a huge attic of intellectual property. "We happen to believe the larger the database the better. We never throw anything away."
The database has become so massive, and valuable, the company has had to come up with a trademarked search technology, dubbed CodeRank, to help users plow through it. "We took the CodeRank name analogously from Google, presenting relevant results first," he explained.
Having quick access to this library of information is what gives coders and corporations confidence that their systems aren't running afoul of others' patents and copyrights. It likely never would have happened had not SCO brought up the issue, which was Cohen's point.
It's also Tolliver's profit. My what big IP teeth you have. The better to protect you with.