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Patent Insanity

ziggy on 2003-02-25T18:32:26

Slashdot reports that Interwoven has been granted a patent for what amounts to using CVS to develop websites. I haven't read the patent fully, but based on Interwoven's summary, I'm inclined to agree with the slashdot commentary that this is "CVS for website development with a pretty face". Unfortunately, it doesn't sound like they're patenting the pretty face, just the "CVS for website development" bits:

Interwoven's U.S. patent (#6505212) describes Interwoven's unique method of using branches, workareas, staging areas, and editions to develop and manage content and all revisions. This patent includes 13 claims covering among other things: A system for asset management comprised of multiple workareas, each configured to maintain a virtual copy of content as it would appear when published;
  • A staging area to which content is submitted from multiple work areas and where any conflicts between content can be resolved;

  • Branches and sub-branches (for different projects or initiatives) that contain individual workareas, staging areas, and editions which allows for massively parallel development on a single platform;

  • The use of a hierarchical file system and an object repository for representing and hosting content and its structure;

  • Virtualization of all content regardless of location as well as Web and application servers ? this allows contributors to make changes "in context" of the entire site;

  • The combined concepts of file history, versioning, comparison, and merging as it relates to content, provide an archive of all individual changes as well as collections of changes so they can be versioned and audited.
The sad part is that this patent was filed in 1999. I know there is prior art for using CVS with website development, because I remember doing that back in 1997 or so.

I remember...

james on 2003-02-25T20:45:14

...using CVS to manage website content prior to Interwoven TeamSite being installed at ebookers in late '99. It makes me wonder as we had the varsity teamsite consultants in at ebookers -- we were one of their case studies for European multi-lingual and multi-national websites of which we were the only customer at the time.

Prior art

nik on 2003-02-26T09:20:56

prior art.

Re:Prior art

ziggy on 2003-02-26T13:57:36

Thanks, Nik. That's probably where I first saw CVS used to track a website. :-)