Oracle Files Blockchain Patent, Forks Tendermint?

Tendermint is a consensus engine (or a blockchain) which drew my attention about a year ago, when one of the founders got into a discussion with @dan about Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus. In short, BFT is a form of DPoS (Delegated Proof of Stake, the same governance system used in Steemit) which allegedly allows a better fault tolerance. A few months later, I had the chance to speak in person with the founders of Tendermint, at a conference in Bucharest. After that, I played with Tendermint extensively and even started an implementation of one my ideas on top of it (this is still work in progress).

So, when I read the news about Oracle forking Tendermint and then filing for a patent, I was quite curious. I started to investigate and here's what I found:

In a patent filing document dated February 11, 2016, Oracle submits a patent for "Accountability and Trust in Distributed Ledger Systems". On August 17 2017, the patent is published and you can read it here. It's all technical and wood language, but you can understand that they're describing a blockchain. If you do a search after "Tendermint", you will find no less than 34 occurrences, and the "open source application" is used as an example many times.

It's not yet clear if Oracle actually forked the open source Tendermint blockchain and then filed for a patent, but it's clear they drew a lot of "inspiration" from it.

Honestly, I'm kinda thorn apart by this. On one side, I'm very happy that Tendermint got the attention of one of the software behemoths out there. On the other side, I feel like they work is being somehow hijacked.

In my personal opinion, patents and blockchains are not going well together. Not well at all.

I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.