Franz Bouma discovered that Microsoft has patented ORMapping . I gave up trying to read all the patent mumbo jumbo, but it sure looks like a patent on OR-Mapping. I’m a bit confused actually to wether it’s just an application, or wether it has been approved.
But anyway, is there no decency? I mean, sure, it would be nice to be evil and sit there collecting royalties from all mapping going on in the world, but this is just too stupid. And even if you were the first one to come up with the idea of mapping, how can you claim ownership of such a general idea? I haven’t really read up on the issue of software patents, but if it’s going to amount to this in Europe too we should be scared.
3 replies on “Microsoft patents OR-Mapping”
[…] ready have patented them. Look at the latest thing now, what Anders Sveen describes in his blog. Microsoft has patended general OR-mappings. Does this mean that projects like […]
My first exposure to O/R mapping was in 1987 when I was in the computer science labs at Carleton U. A student (I can’t remember his name) was talking about some Smalltalk code that he’d written that mapped objects to a relational DB.
Now I don’t have a clue about if this framework had anything to do with TopLink (either directly or indirectly) but that tool did come out of that same environment.
Fortunately for us, Oracle now owns the technology and employs people who know the true origin and have pockets that are deep enough to take on MS.
For all our sakes.. let just hope that they rubbed Oracle the wrong way with this one. It’s time that some of these insane patents get shot down!
Agreed, it’s time that some of the insane patents gets shot down, and you can help to make a difference:
http://www.pubpat.org/