What do I see, floating through the mists ... ?

Ahh ... there's Microsoft, continuing their efforts to buy Datallegro.

Ohhh ... they've done it! Datallegro is being absorbed ...

Ahh ... that pesky lawsuit is still milling about.

Ohhh ... Microsoft agrees to a puny licensing deal with Jardin.

Ahh ... next-gen Datallegro to be called "ClusterF**k".

Ohhh ... original license deal is kaput ... no more Datallegro ... no more licensing.

Poof! Problem solved in classic Microsoft fashion.

I hope none of the owners of previous firms I've worked for have patented 'Golf Fridays', 'cheating on your wife with the company bike Tuesdays' or 'fabricating revenue Wednesdays'. If they have then the guy I'm working for at the moment will is in serious stook.

Is this a wise acquisition on MicroSoft's part? The only thing the name Datallegro puts me in mind of is a certain, diabolically bad, car from the 1970's:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin_Allegro

(mines the ones with the keys on a British Leyland keyfob in the inside pocket)

Yet another scheme to scale data over multiple devices may well be a nifty piece of design but what could possibly have been the Inventive Step(s) to make such a scheme even patentable? One suspects that this is just rehashed old ideas.

I wonder that the big players in this arena like Terradata have to say about their prior art on this matter?

Mine's the one with lawyers' business cards in the pocket - they are are only ones who gain from Software Patents

Oh great. Another patent troll? What's next, a "system for storing data as an abstraction of columns and rows", followed by lawsuits against IBM for DB2, Oracle and Microsoft (SQL Server) ???

These software patents are getting stupider every day.