No Software Patents

Some time ago, I had the idea of creating a pool of ideas about software that has not got the chance of being written yet. That pool would work as a sort of prior art, and searches would get to those ideas, at least making the job of said "patent inventors" a little more difficult. If they can get away with a patent without ever writing any piece of code, why can't we share our ideas just like that?

So here is a quick summary of two ideads I came up with recently, or was reminded of when browsing recently.

Free videos network

There is a small rant here. GNOME publishes their videos using Youtube. You go to gnome.org and the video comes from this proprietary network. A real bummer!

What if you could just stream it from a lot of peers? Using BitTorrent protocol to swarm the video. I am not a fan of BT tracker, but I love DHT and swarm sharing.

The idea is that the Youtube URL would be used as an index on the DHT to look up for the video we want. If it cannot be found, the first user would help us share it. The video would be downloaded from the proprietary platform and published as a Torrent file using the DHT and the Youtube URL (and other data) to index/hash that.

Now, the next users would be able to look up the DHT, find the video and download/watch it, without giving any data to privacy-invading "services".

One possible issue is licensing. But the platform could query the license for the original video and the user could make the decision to share or not to share. Possibly with a policy so the user won't be asked for all videos one encounters.

MANET

Mobile Ad-hoc Networks are old. I mean, 15 years ago, when I was fresh at college, academia was moving on to new stuff. MANETs were last-year's state of the art research.

Nonetheless, we still suffer with our cellular networks. In the recent events of last Friday, I heard a lot of people claiming everyone in the stadium couldn't get network access, because everybody was trying to, at the same time.

If we used MANETs, people would be able to share data with each other. It would need only some people to get outside access to information to be able to multicast that in the network. People could also share messages amongst them. If they needed to send or receive individual messages to the outside, one's failure to get outside network access would not prevent them from using other people's route.

One nice related project is Serval. Unfortunately, one of the first things you see in their site is a Youtube video.