Annoying Patents

It's no secret that I'm opposed to software patents. I believe that the system by which they are registered is not capable of determinining what is truely a novel "invention", and what is derivative in the way that patent protection was designed to operate. As a result this is sometimes determined much later my a court, at great expense, and great profit to the lawyers. In other cases it is used by industry heavyweights with lawyers on their side to bully or bankrupt smaller players who are often responsible for true innovations. More likely, however, a patent is used as insurance so that when someone sues you for a patent infringement, you check your register of patents to see which of them the other party is infringing, and then everyone backs off. Stupid!

So you can imagine my annoyance when I found this patent over the "invention" of Distributed service aggregation and composition which is in my area of research. As usual, it is vague and general enough to apply to a whole host of possible inventions that could arise independently. I suspect that it will be easy enough to find some published prior art... maybe even by my DSTC colleagues, but I'm not sure.

Humph!
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Trust is not a property of a service

Since being employed to work at Smart Services CRC, I have been fully engaged with Service Orientation, and in particular with non-functional charachteristics of services. I keep seeing "Trust" mentioned right alongside "Security" when talking about these non-functional properties.

However, it's obvious to me, just using ordinary English semantics, that "trust" is a property (or attitude, or belief) of a service user with regard to a service, or service provider. It is trust that allows a consumer of a service to hand over their credit card details in the belief that the service they are paying for will be delivered without some fraud taking place.

Now I'm sure my colleagues are not stupid, and don't believe that a service can be modelled for trust. As soon as one starts looking at the literature, it becomes obvious that people are attempting to represent aspects of services and their providers that might engender trust in a service consumer. For example, the YAWL Foundation's
Service-Description.com site's model of "trust" actually models endorsements, operating history and other aspects that give the service user a basis on which to trust a service.

I just wish that writers would be a little more reticent to label things as "trust", which are really to do with "reputation".

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