The New Theft of an Old Idea

I'm curious to know why someone hasn't yet patented realtime query-based searching or customizable metadata. I wonder this because BeOS did it in the nineties. Apple will be doing it with Tiger. And when Microsoft does it with Longhorn in the next few years, they will surely patent it themselves.

Someone should beat these guys to the punch for once. I would rather have the future of filesystems (which is, ironically, the same as its past) in the hands of someone other than a corporation that sued the pants off a guy just for being named Mike Rowe.

When Microsoft's next-generation filesystem and Apple's next-generation filesystem finally make waves, each of them is going to look more or less like the old BFS. (For those who are rusty: BFS was a 64-bit journaling filesystem that supported user-defined metadata and searched using queries like a database. It remains the be-all and end-all of file storage nirvana.) It bothers me that some other company is going to lay claim to what rightfully belongs to Jean-Louis Gassée and the fifty-odd developers who worked for him. And people are going to think that this idea came out of Redmond, or came out of Cupertino. They will herald Steve Jobs as a visionary and completely ignore the substantial efforts made by Dominic Giampaolo. (As a note, Dominic is currently working for Apple. He's most assuredly working on Tiger, but he's merely reinventing something he already perfected when he worked for Be.)

In short, Apple doesn't deserve to get the glory of their next filesystem. Microsoft doesn't deserve it either. It belongs to Jean-Louis and Dominic and a handful of others. Remember that in ten years when your searches are instantaneous and Microsoft is calling it their own. It's not. They stole it. They stole it and they're raping its corpse.