A very serious matter that has plagued the IT industry for the past few years has popped up in my dear aviation community. I'm sure some are aware that runwayfinder.com and flyagogo.com and some other sites are down.
The jist is about a year ago FlightPrep was awarded a patent for online flight planning (a little more technical than that, but not much). The IT industry (at least the corners that I have been involved in) has always hated software patents mainly because they are primarily used by lawyers to sue when someone creates a product that was imminent anyway (online flight planning, email on smart phone etc..) and not much else. Jeppesen and the AOPA basically told FlighPrep to sit on it and spin, but the little guys like runway finder don't have the legal team to do that. I encourage you all to write AOPA and tell them how you feel. Write the EFF (Electronic Frontier foundation) the guy that runs runway finder, flyagogo anything JUST DO SOMETHING. These services are offline now due to a greedy lawyer and most likely a last ditch effort to squeeze some capital out of an already dead company. We can ***** about Somali pirates, Bush, Obama, FAA blah blah blah. We CANNOT let FlightPrep get away with this extortion and take away the hard work of industrious individuals and at the same time rob the aviation community of valuable resources. WRITE SOMEONE!!
My original post on the matter http://www.piperforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=686
P.S. SkyVector is not as guilty, they just paid the ransom FlightPrep wanted due to fear, a spineless move in my opinion and i wont support them either.
The jist is about a year ago FlightPrep was awarded a patent for online flight planning (a little more technical than that, but not much). The IT industry (at least the corners that I have been involved in) has always hated software patents mainly because they are primarily used by lawyers to sue when someone creates a product that was imminent anyway (online flight planning, email on smart phone etc..) and not much else. Jeppesen and the AOPA basically told FlighPrep to sit on it and spin, but the little guys like runway finder don't have the legal team to do that. I encourage you all to write AOPA and tell them how you feel. Write the EFF (Electronic Frontier foundation) the guy that runs runway finder, flyagogo anything JUST DO SOMETHING. These services are offline now due to a greedy lawyer and most likely a last ditch effort to squeeze some capital out of an already dead company. We can ***** about Somali pirates, Bush, Obama, FAA blah blah blah. We CANNOT let FlightPrep get away with this extortion and take away the hard work of industrious individuals and at the same time rob the aviation community of valuable resources. WRITE SOMEONE!!
My original post on the matter http://www.piperforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=686
P.S. SkyVector is not as guilty, they just paid the ransom FlightPrep wanted due to fear, a spineless move in my opinion and i wont support them either.
