March 10, 1991

AS USUAL, I ran into about a billion people I hadn’t seen in years at the Windows & OS/2 Conference last week ˆ including Paul Heckel, author of a popular book, “The Elements of Friendly Software Design,” and most recently a pariah in the software industry for having had the audacity to enforce his patent on a kind of software he calls a “card metaphor” with Apple Computer (and coming up, with IBM and a few other companies).

Think of it as an electronic “index card” that provides an improved way to view and manipulate information, in much the same way that an electronic spreadsheet like Lotus 1-2-3 improved how people maneuver around accounting ledgers and budgets.

Heckel claims to have first invented, then used, the card metaphor in his product called Viewdex, and a bit later in an IBM PC version called Zoomracks, way before Apple came out with its much-vaunted Hypercard. He collected a tidy sum in an out-of-court settlement with Apple. He’s now going after both IBM and Asymetrix Corp., publisher of a program called Toolbook and widely described as a “Hypercard clone” for IBM PCs.

Later this month, Sybex Inc. in Alameda will release a new edition of “The Elements of Friendly Software Design.” Heckel has added an epilogue, called “The Wright Brothers and Software Invention,” in which he provides a detailed and fascinating analogy between the Wrights and his own problems with Zoomracks.

The more gory aspects of this have great voyeuristic appeal, but are especially topical in light of Thursday’s ruling in the court case of Microsoft vs. Apple on graphical user interfaces. The whole issue of intellectual property, whether protected by copyright or patent, is a very sticky wicket and Heckel’s extremely sane discussion of the issue has made me, at least, think about this issue in a different light.

Many captains of the software industry have come out in full regalia against software patents, claiming they stifle innovation and will eventually kill the software business. Even the director of the Software Publishers Association, Kenneth Wasch, holds the view that patents are lethal to the software business. But this strikes me as curious. Why would some genius programmer, slaving away in a dark den redolent of cheese puffs and body odor, be willing to work for years on a revolutionary new software design if he or she didn’t have any guarantee at all of being able to make money doing it?

I have a feeling that the problem is at least twofold: one is the Patent Office itself, which (generously speaking) is known to grant patents without, shall we say, benefit of deep technical knowledge of what it’s doing. Another, equally important, is one of perception.

Inventors, as a (loose) rule, are often single-minded to the point of boorishness, tend to be strident and, overall, lack a certain degree of humility and social skill. Worse yet, they’re often poor; having committed themselves to “the struggle,” they don’t yet bear the visible badges of success that give people credibility in our status-based society. In essence, they aren’t very sympathetic characters. Compare them to soothing-toned, well-kempt corporate public relations experts and guess who comes out on top.

SPA’s Wasch has publicly likened software patents to “extortion,” but I would be hard pressed to find an inventor with an honestly-earned patent that I could call an extortionist. Anyhow, what would happen if Congress did pass a law saying software couldn’t be patented? In the United States, still considered the hotbed of both excellent software and entrepreneurialism, who ˆ big companies or little guys ˆ would bother to create a new technology in an atmosphere of total anarchy?

In utopia, maybe, people give away the fruits of their labor just because it’s the thing to do. But this ain’t utopia. If there’s a problem with the way we protect intellectual property, then let’s fix it. But let’s not murder innovation on the way from here to there.

Denise Caruso can be reached by writing to her at P.O.Box 5199, Belmont, CA 94002. She can also be reached electronically via America Online (DCaruso), The WELL (dcaruso@well.sf.ca.us) or MCI Mail (Denise Caruso).