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theory on demand
Naturally, all projects conducted at Stanford are patented by the university, and this mixture of incentives bestowed on F/OSS projects on one side, and with a mad run on patents on the other, does not sit well with the ideal, let alone the practice, of ‘research for its own sake’, as is being trumpeted by Google as its strength and its pride. The issue of patents becomes even more interesting when considering the fact that Google’s success primarily rests on an algorithm invented by Larry Page in collaboration with Sergey Brin, at a time when they both were still researchers at the Computer Sciences Faculty of Stanford. The algorithm that revolutionized the indexing of the Web is hence the property of Stanford, subjected to a regular patent. In the next chapter(s) we will look into how this prodigy functions, how it manages to return results in less time than any competitor does, as if it is able to give each and every user ‘exactly what she wants’.