Rackspace Introduces New Mobile Plan, Fights Patent Trolls

Rackspace recently launched its “mobile-ready” stack for developers which allow them to use the pre-packaged backend repeatedly every time they have a mobile project. According to John Engates, Rackspace CTO, the firm is including experience and expertise in its pre-packaged backend so that developers need not spend a lot of time in developing the backend.

According to him, developers can focus on the software’s frontend to provide a great user experience to their customers. Rackspace includes its reference architectures to its mobile stack which can be optimized by developers for their own use. The first release caters to developers using LAMP PHP with MySQL.

Also, Rackspace is challenging Rotatable Technologies which had sued the company for patent infringement by using rotating screen display. According to reports, Rotatable is willing to settle for $75,000 or less. But, Rackspace won’t settle and is willing to face the lawsuit. According to Alan Schoenbaum, Rackpace General Counsel, Rotatable can’t go after Rackspace because of patent exhaustion, a legal theory which prevents patent holders from suing downstream users when they have settled or lost a case and eventually grants a license to upstream defendants.

This isn’t the first time Rackspace is fighting patent trolls. It has sued Parallel Iron for claiming that the company is liable for patent infringement because it used the Hadoop Distributed File System. Rackspace is able to challenge patent holders because of the recent reforms in patent law which allows 3rd parties like Rackspace to question the patent’s validity based on the presence of a prior art. Google Patent Search is a helpful utility to search for a prior art. However, Schoenbaum says that the new patent reform law is far from perfect and Rackspace will continuously fight patent trolls.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *