[9fans] The PATENTED IBM MULTI-PIPE : the evolution of unix pipes

[mycroftiv@sphericalharmony.com]

The amazing PATENTED IBM Multi-Pipe!

I wanted to post to let 9fans know about an exciting new software
patent that was just issued by the US patent office.  United States
Patent #8,380,765 is for an incredible new Plan 9 related
supercomputing technology called the Multi-pipe.  If you want to know
what a Multi-pipe is, its simple:

The basic idea of a multi-pipe is a natural evolution of the original
Unix pipes concept, updated to the modern networking era.  Instead of
just having a single reader and a single writer on the ends of a pipe,
a Multi-pipe allows you to multiplex readers and writers.  This
upgrade to unix pipes - especially when combined with network
transparency such as that provided by 9P - lets you do cluster
processing techniques like fan-out, fan-in, using very similar
semantics to traditional unix pipes, but with arbitrarily complex
topologies of multiple readers and writers.  The Blue Gene team wrote
about multipipes: "The result dramatically simplified the architecture
and improved overall system performance.  It became clear that
multipipes were a useful primitive for the construction of
applications and other system services." (Quote from the IBM HARE
Final Research Report RC25241 (W1111-212) November 28 2011 Computer
Science)

I believe the idea of a Multi-pipe is a natural progression of basic
unix pipes, and this amazing Patented Invention of IBM's is something
that I think everyone should know about.  In fact, I am so excited by
the Multi-pipe that I have made an effort to allow all Plan 9 users
the ability to get the same benefits as offered by this amazing
Patented Invention that was purely the result of IBM's original
research and innovation.

Because IBM has a patent on this technology, it wasn't safe to just
try to put out my own version and offer it to the world.  IBM has a
lot of lawyers - and probably some of those lawyers were trained by my
late father, John A. Kidwell.  He taught intellectual property law at
the University of Wisconsin for a long time, and he gave me a lot of
good advice.  One piece of his good advice was that you never, ever,
ever should disagree with the IBM lawyers.  So, I hope that everything
in this post shows that I am in complete agreement with all of the
opinions of IBM's legal team, whatever they are.

Anyway, I thought the world deserved to have a non-patent encumbered
version of Multi-pipes that could deliver very similar functionality,
but not conflict with IBM's Patented Invention.  So, I used
/dev/timemachine to send some software back in time to 2009, before I
could see any trace of IBM Multi-pipes.  I sent the Iosrv and Hubfs
software back to the sources server between 7/01/09 and 8/01/09 (you
can check the dump) so in this way I thought I could avoid any
potential issues with IBM's legal team.

I hope that anyone who is interested in US Patent 8380765:

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=8380765.PN.&OS=PN/8380765&RS=PN/8380765

Might be interested in a free open source alternative which should
be free of any patent licensing issues in relation to this patent.

-Ben Kidwell
"mycroftiv"

PS - I have tremendous personal respect and admiration for the
individuals who worked on the Blue Gene project.  As a hobbyist
programmer with a basement of junky old computers, it is exciting to
feel a kind of mental kinship with others who are working at a vastly
larger scale on more significant projects.  I hope someday to meet
some of you and we can talk Plan 9 and it will be very friendly.  I am
an old hippie who is full of peace and love.  I do truly love the
Patented Invention of multi-pipes so my use of a time machine to send
similar software back in time shouldn't be taken as anything other
than attempt to give a good idea to the community in a way which is
free of patent issues.