Why the Patent Pending?

We feel that this requires a bit of an explanation as we have traditionally been very much opposed to software patents. We feel that if a person (or group of people) work hard and develop something using their intellect and talents, then they should be free to offer the fruits of their labor to the market. That is how we would like to be treated and that is how we would like to treat others.

But the above is based on an assumption, one that we have found out does not always hold true. The implicit assumption in our line of reasoning was that people are going to be intellectually honest with themselves and are not going to reinvent the wheel simply because they can. The assumption is that people feel that simply copying what someone has done before them is a waste of time and intellectual energy and that they would instead prefer to do something new and innovative. Unfortunately, our experience with AnthillPro has taught the hard way about how the market can behave.

We feel that we have expended most of our energy on developing the concepts that are embodied in AnthillPro3, not in developing the actual code. There is at least one order of magnitude difference between the effort required to develop the concepts and the effort required to develop the code for those concepts. And yes, we do feel that if someone came along and were to simply take the concepts that we have spent literally man-years developing and reimplemented those concepts in a competing product without adding anything new to those concepts or even modifying them, then that would be unfair. And, we would like to prevent the possibility of something like that happening; that's why the concepts in AnthillPro 3 are patent pending.

Just because we don't want someone from mindlessly reimplement the concepts that we developed for AnthillPro3 does not mean that we wish to avoid competition. Far from it, we still invite competition. But competition must be meaningful. We seek competitors that put effort into understanding the problems posed by Build Management and Application Lifecycle Automation and spend their own intellectual energy developing solutions to those problems. If they really think about it and approach the problem with intellectual honesty, chances are that they will come up with solutions that are different from what we've developed. And that would be exciting for all of us since it would deliver on the promise of competition that we learned about when studying Adam Smith.

After we released Anthill, we were looking forward to competition because we felt that it would move the entire market space forward. We felt that as competitors entered the market, their products would be innovative and thus they would push us to innovate faster as well. We felt that we could feed of each other's innovations the same way that a good development team feeds off each others accomplishments. As far as innovation goes, competition turned out to be a big disappointment. Instead of innovation, we got:

• People that copied our product to the point where they literally have copied mistakes that we've made (yes, we have made mistakes :). Then they competed with us by undercutting our price by $50.
• People that spent 3 months evaluating our product at no cost and then released their own competing product with basically the same set of capabilities as our product. They also copied a feature that we introduced in AnthillPro 2.x and later abandoned in AnthillPro 3.x once we realized the feature was a mistake.
• People that requested a license swap (a license of our product for a license for their unrelated product), and then released a competing product with no new features.
• Numerous other "me too" copy cats.

Don't take our word for it though, judge for yourself. Take a look at the front page of any of the competing products. They all have the same basic set of information that we introduced in Anthill OS and later AnthillPro 2.x. That set of information is: a list of projects along with the status of the most recent build, a queue of build requests, a progress bar indicating progress on the currently executing builds. You may say that this is an obvious set of info that all products of this type need to have by definition. But that is not true. All similar products prior to Anthill did not have this information -- look at Tinderbox or CruiseCrontrol from that time period. Further, to see real innovation, take a look at the front page of AnthillPro 3.x -- it also breaks from the mold and is an example of true innovation that really adds something to the concepts in AnthillPro 2.x.