Rebuilding the Pyramids

There’s a lovely story in Kable about the Egyptian Government building a Gateway, just like the UK one but different. That is to say that they’ve managed to copy everythiing we’ve done but not pay any royalty. Right. It seems to me that Avi has been digging in a field in Putney, found two marble fingers and pronounced that he has discovered the missing arms of the Venus de Milo statue, housed in the Louvre.

I’ve met Ahmed Darwish a few times, shared pretty much everything about how the Gateway works and so on. I’ve even seen colleagues of his present my slides at conferences (without credit of course). I’ve also seen the story in Computer Weekly a year or so ago where Ahmed announced that he was already using our Gateway code in a pilot. It’s over a year since I last met Ahmed and since then we’ve moved the Gateway on a great deal, so he’s missed out on a few features if he’s using ours.

But, the reality is that he isn’t. Unless Avi’s asking me to believe that Ahmed’s taken the code from the pilot version, enlisted Microsoft to help update it and asked them not to tell us – and then bragged to the press about it. Does’t add up, does it? Besides, he’s using Oracle which we don’t use in the Gateway and doubtless there are a bunch of other differences. If there aren’t, I’m expecting a cheque in the mail from Ahmed any day now.

It didn’t work out between us and Egypt for them using the Gateway, but that’s no reason to make up a bunch of stories. Must be just how Kylie feels, although Kable has nothing on the News of the World of course.