Yours is the very experience and insight needed in this discussion.
If McKibben did have something to do with germinating the concepts used in FB, and if he really DID, as per according to the article I cited, seek out competent patent counsel which was playing for the “Obama transform America” team, and was betrayed thereby, then that lawyer did so much harm to him, and to all of us by that betrayal.
It appears that lawyer muddied the waters so terribly that IF McKibben indeed was part of the genius behind solving system approaches to making a social media platform work, then he may never be able to be granted the fruits of his labor and idea, nor possibly others who also may have simultaneously came up with similar ideas and projects.
I am not from a computer tech background, and have not used Gmail, so I confess I don’t know what “tags” in Gmail might be. While I admire your analogy, I fear I do not understand it.
Tags allow you, AFTER THE FACT, to categorize information which, in the case of Gmail, is messages.
Let’s suppose I have hundreds of message in my inbox and am interested in finding all mail with “Qanon” in it. In Gmail, I make tag called Qanon and it goes through all my email and creates a list that I can examine of all email that fits this criteria. Pretty simple, and basically the scope of McKibben’s patent.
I have read in detail a fair amount written about this alleged injustice. There are claims that IBM open sourced this patented information just in time for Facebook to put it into use. While this nefarious claim is certainly possible, to me it is more likely that Zuckerberg/ Facebook discovered the obvious details about the patent on their own and put it into use on Facebook, just like Gmail did. Give the nature of Facebook’s approach to software development,I just don’t feel that Facebook even looked at this IBM code. Too formal, without the geek factor of most open source code.
I don’t see any contemporary discussion about Facebook’s alleged complicity in this nefarious act. I see a discussion many years later about this violation. This behavior is typical of patent trolls who wait until many actors have violated the alleged claim, and then litigate these claims so that the accused find it easier to pay a settlement and fight it in court.
As I said, as a person in a directly related field, I do not find the patent novel or nonobvious. While I am no fan of Facebook’s myriad of allegedly illegal activities, I just don’t think that McKibben’s account is an any way persuasive.
Michael’s claims are not just against Facebook but include IBM’s development platform named Eclipse which uses collaboration and version control using a central database.