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journal and was implemented and distributed in Berkeley UNIX. The concept of an include file is patented. The concept of a cursor is patented. Subtraction was patented as a measure to fix software that was not Y2K compliant. The process of copying an image from memory to an on-screen window is patented, as is the use of the XOR operation to handle overlapping windows. Several data encryption standards are patented. The concept of embedding advertising material in a user interface is patented. Most recently, British Telecom has claimed to own a patent—which they say they intend to enforce—on hypertext links.

In the second edition of this book, we griped about software patents and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s naivete with respect to software. These issues are still of great concern five years later, but in the United States an even bigger evil has emerged: the business practice patent. Patents have been issued for mundane activities such as pulling up a customer’s account from a computer database when the customer dials in to a help desk. Amazon.com has obtained a business practice patent on “1-click technology”; they obtained an injunction requiring Barnes and Noble to make their customers perform at least two mouse clicks to purchase books.[8

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The patent office is attempting to clean up its act, but the damage seems to have already been done in many cases. A major milestone was the 1994 recall of a patent belonging to Compton’s New Media which involved retrieval systems for data stored on CD-ROM. Some analysts considered it broad enough to cover 80% of all existing CD-ROM products, although that is probably an exaggeration. In the end, each of 41 claims was invalidated through an expensive and time-consuming campaign on the part of software vendors to demonstrate the existence of prior art.

The discovery of prior art is the real weakness in the patent office’s process. Patent applications are kept secret, and with very little software expertise in the patent office, it is difficult for them to know which applications really represent new technology. Lawsuits will eventually decide, and the lawyers will be the winners.

Check out the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s archives at www.eff.org for more specifics. A good source of breaking news is slashdot.org’s patent area.

27.14 ORGANIZATIONS, CONFERENCES, AND OTHER RESOURCES

Several UNIX support groups—both general and vendor-specific—exist to help you network with other people that are using the same software. Table 27.4 presents a brief list of organizations. Plenty of national and regional groups exist that are not listed in this table. Many of these organizations would probably take exception to our use of the word UNIX and insist that they are “open systems” folks.

Table 27.4 UNIX organizations

Each organization holds conferences on UNIX-related topics; most are broader than just UNIX and include tracks and/or events for Windows NT, too. USENIX holds one general conference and several specialized (smaller) conferences or workshops each year. The big event for sysadmins is the USENIX LISA (Large Installation System Administration) conference every fall. USENIX, EUROPEN, and AUUG have substantial trade shows associated with their conferences.

The premier trade show for the networking industry is Interop; its tutorial series is also of high quality and is not UNIX-specific. Interop used to be an annual event that was eagerly awaited by techies and vendors alike. Interops now happens several times a year—a traveling network circus, so to speak. The salaries of tutorial speakers have been cut in half, but the quality of the tutorials seems to have survived.

SAGE: the System Administrators’ Guild

SAGE, USENIX’s System Administrators’ Guild, is the first international organization for system administrators. It promotes system administration as a profession by sponsoring conferences and informal programs. See www.sage.org for all the details.

SAGE is currently exploring the issue of certification. They plan to develop a certification process