U.S. sets goal of the 21st century: building a better Patent Office

This is just one of the signs that have many critics, saying that the Office has your head firmly in the 20th century, if not the 19th century.

Only in the last three years the Office has started to accept a majority of its applications in digital form. Mr. Obama surprised a group of executives of technology last year, when he described how the Office print some archived applications from your computer and analyze it in another computer system, incompatible.

"There is no company that I know of that would have allowed it to enter the State in which we are", David j. Kappos, 18 months ago he became Director of the patent and Trademark Office and under Secretary of Commerce for intellectual property, said in a recent interview. "If it were, the c.e.o. would have been made redundant, the Board would have been cast out, and you would have had shareholder lawsuits."

Once the patent applications are in the system, sit — for years. Pipeline of the Patent Office is so clogged that takes two years to an inventor get an initial judgment and another year or more before they finally released a patent.

The delays and inefficiencies are more of a nuisance for inventors. Patentable ideas are the basis for many start-up companies and small and medium-sized enterprises. Venture capitalists often require a start-up to get a patent before offering financing. This means that delays patents cost jobs, slow down the economy and threatening the ability of American companies to compete with foreign companies.

Much of the decline of the Patent Office has occurred over the past 13 years, as Internet age created a surge in applications. In 1997, were pending patents for every one 2.25 released. By 2008, that the rate was nearly tripled, 6 6 patents pending for every one released. The figure fell under six last year.

Although the ranks of the Patent Office examiners and its budget increased by about 25 percent over the past five years, which has not been sufficient to keep pace with a flood of applications — which grew to more than 2,000 a day last year, for a total of 950 509,000, from one day in 1997.

The Office, as a few other corners of Government, has paid along the way, thanks to the maintenance and application. That income — $ 2.1 billion last year — has made it an inviting target for the Congress, which in the past 20 years have deflected a total of 800 million for other uses, rather than leave the Office to invest the money in its operations.

Also, applications have become much more complex, said Douglas k. Norman, President of intellectual property owners Association, a trade group of mainly large technology and manufacturing companies.

"When I was a young lawyer patent, a patent application would be from 20 to 25 pages and have 10 to 15 credits", said Mr. Norman. A claim is part of the patent that defines what is protected. "Now they run hundreds of pages, with hundreds and sometimes thousands of credits".

Lost in the control of the impasse of the Office, however, was the fact that the number of patents issued reached a record last year — more than 209,000, or 29% more than the average of 162,000 a year in the four previous years. Waste also hit a high of 258,000 — is not a measure of quality, Mr. Kappos said, but a sign of greater efficiency.

Between the backlog of 700.000 patents pending their first action by an examiner and 500,000 patents which are in the process, a total of 1.2 million applications are pending.

Open Office Dilemma: OpenOffice.org vs LibreOffice

OpenOffice.org is one of the main competitors to Microsoft Office suite of Office productivity applications. Originally developed as StarOffice in the 1990s, the suite had managed in recent years by Sun Microsystems as an open source project. But when Oracle acquired Sun in April 2009, the future of Sun's software offerings--especially free like OpenOffice.org--has been called into question. Long before the start, the leading developer of OpenOffice.org, unhappy with the status quo in Oracle, defecting spy from the project.

The result was LibreOffice, a new fork of the code of OpenOffice.org base which is maintained by a non-profit organization called the foundation document. LibreOffice looks like OpenOffice.org, and works like OpenOffice.org. Also reads and writes OpenDocument file format of OpenOffice.org. The difference is that LibreOffice was developed fully based on the Community, without supervision by Oracle. (The "libre" in the name of the suite is derived from a root meaning "freedom erudite.")

[Also on InfoWorld: "10 great free desktop productivity tools that aren't OpenOffice.org" | Track the latest trends in open source with open sources blog and InfoWorld Technology: Open Source newsletter. ]

The question is, which suite should you use? OpenOffice.org is LibreOffice recently announced version 3.3.0 of their goods. Both are available as free download (although Oracle also sells a version of OpenOffice.org which includes commercial support). What will be the best bet for now or in the near future? I installed both to discover.

installation and Language SupportOpenOffice.org and LibreOffice each consists of six questions, called Writer, Calc, Impress, Base, Draw and math in both suites. The modules provide word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphic design business, database management and amending formula, respectively.

Both suites are available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X (Intel and PowerPC). You can also get OpenOffice.org for Solaris (Sparc and Intel). Because I wanted to test the most typical scenario for Office-replacement, however, I ran both suites on a Intel PC running Windows 7.

Executable installers for both suites are similar; They ask the same questions and the installation scripts seem identical, even if the installation of LibreOffice is a bit slow. I chose to install typical for both.

LibreOffice has support for a wide range of languages than OpenOffice.org.