March 2023 — Judge Mastroianni just dictated that Connexin Software Inc., AKA Office Practicum (OP), should respond to our interrogatories regarding their business in Massachusetts so as to provide inputs for him on the issue of venue.  (Not the case itself, but just whether it can be heard in Massachusetts where I do business with them.)  This is exactly what he said about a year ago, but Office Practicum’s lawyers did everything to obstruct that discovery, costing me about $30,000 in legal fees, a year of my life, and leading my lawyer to ask for sanctions.  Those, after a long delay, led to the judge, a year later, to simply telling OP to do what he told them to do in the first place.

So here I am, an individual retired software engineer, realizing (am I the first person to observe this?) that our legal system works very well for companies backed by $3 billion private equity firms and not so well for individuals.

There seems to be no reason for a large company to NOT steal intellectual property from individuals if it suits them.

One other point, my lawyer advises me against writing this blog, because they have threatened to sue me for libel for doing so.  Now, there’s nothing I write that isn’t true, except that doesn’t mean they can’t sue, and tie me up in a different case, that will impact and complicate the first one.  I don’t care.  Here’s a brief history of the case up to the present.

History

Here is the full background on the case: VacLogic Lawsuit, what follows is a quick summary.

The copyright infringement law suit against Office Practicum began in September of 2021, after they informed me, in July of 2021, that they were no longer going to pay a $7,000 annual license for my product, ARulesXL, a fee they had paid every year since 2010.  This would have been OK, except they further informed me they were going to continue to use ARulesXL without paying for an annual license.

Office Practicum provides software that supports pediatric medical practices and ARulesXL is the platform that enables their module that analyzes and schedules all of those childhood vaccines.

Multiple attempts to get them to pay the annual license fee, or to get them to stop using the product, failed, so, for the first time in my 30+ years in business I contacted a lawyer.  We sued for copyright infringement and asked the court for an injunction to stop them from using and distributing the software to their customers.

The case is incredibly simple and no more complicated than expressed in that paragraph above.  Yet tens of thousands of dollars went into motions and counter motions and counters to those motions.  These include their argument that a 2003 memorandum of understanding (MOU) written years before ARulesXL existed, and that makes no mention of ARulesXL, gives them the right to use the software without paying license fees, and their argument that an injunction would be horribly unfair since their customers rely on the accurate vaccine information ARulesXL supports.  (For example, they used the unlicensed software in early 2022 to include and distribute vaccine support for the childhood Covid-19 vaccines, allowing their customers to schedule the vaccines, manage their vaccine inventories, and deal with all the agencies that require childhood vaccine information.)

It might be noted that I have always had a good relationship with Fred Pytlac, the founder of Office Practicum, and co-signer of that 2003 MOU, and that he attributed a large part of their commercial success to the competitive advantage I gave them with vaccines. The success led to his retirement and selling the company to Pamlico, a $3B private equity company, under whose management the decision was made to no longer honor the annual license fees that Fred had cheerfully honored in the past.

It took until February 2022 to get all the arguments filed to the Springfield Mass. federal court where Judge Mark Mastroianni would be reviewing and handling the case.  Oh, and one other thing.  Office Practicum challenged the venue, saying we couldn’t bring suit in Massachusetts.

It took till around May of 2022 for Judge Mastroianni to review the case.  He decided that, before looking at the particulars of the case, the issue of venue had to be settled.  The fact that I am in Massachusetts, and they have a registered agent here, and at least three customers, all this documented in the filings, was apparently not enough to settle the issue and he asked for us to go through a discovery period.  So we sent interrogatories to their counsel asking for information about their customer base among other things.

By August of 2022 it became clear they had no intention of answering any of them as they had tied the whole process up arguing trivia and costing, again, tens of thousands of dollars to just try to get to the start of dealing with the venue question.  (For example, when we asked them to identify their customers in Massachusetts they said they objected to the use of the word “identify” and on and on like that. See Legal-Strategy for mind-boggling details.)  So in September of 2022, my attorney asked the court for sanctions, to grant us the venue, and to proceed with the case.

And then…. nothing happened.

Finally, six months later, in March of 2023 the Judge Mastroianni responded, saying he was not going to grant the sanctions, but that Office Practicum had to answer our discovery questions, meaning we are still, after much time and expense, at the exact same place we were a year ago.

Note that we have approached them multiple times with settlement offers, and asked them to respond with counter offers and they have never acknowledged or responded to any of them.  I have attempted to talk directly to Kraig Brown, the CEO, and he tells me his lawyers advise him against any direct contact.

Meanwhile, having had unlicensed access to my software for the year from July 2021 to July 2022, they used that time wisely to move their vaccine algorithm to a different platform.  So an injunction is now meaningless and their legal strategy of obfuscation and delay has served them well.  Their liability, now, in the case is for that year of copyright infringement, for profit, of my intellectual property. This is a federal crime. 

Am I mad?  Well I’m a retired software engineer in a law suit with a $3B private equity owned company.  How’s it going?  It cost me, just for this last year and the venue issue alone, around $30,000 in legal fees and a year of my life to get, well, absolutely no where.  We are exactly where we were a year ago, with the judge telling Office Practicum to answer our interrogatories relating to, not the case itself, but the venue in which the case might be tried.

Am I the first person to observe that our legal system seems to be working well for companies like Pamlico and not so well for individuals?

VacLogic Lawsuit

When Fred and I agreed on a $7,000 annual license fee for ARulesXL, which is the technology underlying VacLogic, I never thought it would be forever. It always seemed to me that the industry would be much better off if CDC came up with some way to provide that service in a uniform way to all providers.

I only now have done some Googling about, and, indeed there are a number of technologies available today that do, basically, what VacLogic does, and, it appears, CDC provides information designed to directly feed into these technologies. They are all relatively recent. I enjoyed reading about them, as they deal with all the situations that VacLogic handled twenty years ago.

I always expected, as I entered my retirement, that at some point Connexin would say that there is a new technology that we’ll be using instead, this will be the last year we need a license. Or maybe even, we’ve already switched to a new technology and no longer need ARulesXL. Thank you for your service.

And then, as you can see on this Web site, I’d continue working on jazz guitar, picture books for kids, op-ed newspaper pieces, grandkids, a garden and all the other sorts of things 76 year old might get involved in.

But it turns out that’s not how an investment capital company, like Pamlico, operates. Pamlico’s management team would rather stop paying the $7,000, use the software anyway, and then pay, I’m guessing, at least 10 to 20 times that much to crush me in court when I sued.

Then make no offer to settle, and instead start work on a replacement for VacLogic. It appears, but who knows, that VacLogic+ might be just that. The same user interface, but the “intelligence” inside is implemented using one of the new technologies available.

That is, of course, exactly what they should be doing, and by using a standard technology, they’ll be compatible with other vendors. Now, this will be a new world for them, as the tremendous advantage VacLogic gave them twenty years ago, is no longer in play. But still, they’re now a player in the pediatric EHR market and VacLogic helped get them there.

So why did they have to take a year of my life, and a significant portion of my retirement funds to do it? Well the law suit continues, now looking for compensation for the year they used, in violation of Federal Copyright Law, the ARulesXL version of VacLogic without a license.

VacLogic Lawsuit

I probably should address the open source issue. Connexin raises this as a secondary reason why they shouldn’t have to pay license fees to use ARulesXL. It’s true that I had intended to make an open source version ofARulesXL. But I never actually finished the project, which was the licensing.

Connexin’s lawyers, in their declarations, seem to imply that if I intended to make an open source version of ARulesXL, then Connexin no longer had to pay the license fee for the commercial version they were using.

Maybe non-programmers might be confused by this point, but the name of their company is Connexin Software Inc. They’re a software company. They know what open source is.

To use open source software they would have to download the source code for the software, and use it to rebuild the executable version of the program, and have a valid open source license for the use they intended to make of the software.

They never claimed to have downloaded sources, never claimed to have rebuilt executables, and never claimed to have a valid open source license (one never existed). They just waved their hands and said they shouldn’t have to pay if I were willing to offer it open source. And, of course, they had the MoU.

VacLogic Lawsuit

Most people, and in fact, many programmers, don’t understand why a rule-based approach is better for some application areas. Let me try to explain.

A computer does one thing at a time. It executes instructions. Usually it’s one instruction after another, but sometimes there are branching instructions. These basically say in this condition go here next, otherwise go there next.

You often see this type of flow of control represented in flow charts. Flow charts are often used in designing software.

Pricing Example

Pricing is one of the application areas that is notoriously difficult to code using conventional techniques. Consider these simplified rules for old school phone pricing:

If weekday and day time then cost is 10 cents per minute.
If weekday and night time then cost is 7 cents per minute.
If weekend and day time then cost is 6 cents per minute.
If weekend and night time then cost is 4 cents per minute.

Now, a human looking at the rules, and told whether a call was made during the week or not and during the day or not, could easily determine the cost of the call.

But a programmer, writing software to automate these rules, needs to superimpose some flow of control on them. Immediately a decision has to be made as to where to start. Does the program start by asking if it’s a weekday and then asking if it’s day or night? Or does it start by asking if it’s day or night, and then if it’s a weekend or not?

Now, it’s certainly possible to write that software, but problems arise when the rules change, and the software needs to change. Imagine if management decided to make Friday evenings the same as weekends, and holidays the same as weekends? So where do these changes get put in the program? Well it depends on those flow of control decisions.

Rule-based programming is different. For this example, a programmer using a rule language would write the rules, well, exactly as they were written. In any order, without worrying about flow of control issues.

Instead, a rule-based programming language has a component called a “reasoning engine” that takes input, such as weekday or weekend and day or night, and uses those inputs to dynamically select the rule that applies.

Vaccination Analysis and Forecasting

The problem of analyzing a child’s vaccination history, and then determining which doses of which vaccines will be required next, is one of those problems that are very difficult to code with step-by-step programming languages, but relatively easy using a rule-based approach.

Here are some of the complications. There are vaccines for the individual diseases: measles, mumps and rubella. There is a combination vaccine, MMR, that includes all three. But measles requires two doses, the others only one. So MMR is a two dose vaccine. But what if the child already had some single doses?

Those happen to also be live virus vaccines. There are rules about them as well, and you can’t give a live virus vaccine without waiting some time period, maybe a month, after other live viruses. So if a child is due for an MMR in two weeks, but had a Varicella (another live virus) a week ago, then the next MMR can only be given after three weeks.

The vaccines with 4 and 5 dose schedules get even more complex. There is a standard sequence to give the vaccines, but what if one was missing, or given at an incorrect interval? There are then modified schedules to use instead. More rules, more exceptions…

As with our beginning easy example, it’s certainly possible to write a program to handle all this, but there is so much flow of control information superimposed on the rules that it becomes near impossible to maintain. It becomes what is called, “spaghetti code” with hopelessly tangled flow of control strands.

Suppose the CDC comes out with guidelines for Covid-19 for children. Where do those rules get added? And of course there’s complexities on them as well as there are different vendors, and boosters and…

But with a rule-based approach, the new rules for Covid-19 can be simply entered as new rules. And the software is off and running.

In writing VacLogic, I used my own rule-based tools and technology. But they’re not the only ones. Programmers can find other tools to enable this application, and/or write their own reasoning engines and rule languages.

VacLogic Lawsuit

This is purely an opinion piece.

I have a general mistrust of our health care industry. I don’t question the technology, the amazing things that can be done. Rather, I am disturbed that profit seems to be as much of a motive behind it as a desire to help people.

Here’s an example. I recently went for an eye exam, and the place I went to had multiple check out counters. It, as I said on seeing it, “reeked of health care business.” I wound up learning a little bit about that particular practice.

They were in the business of providing cataract surgery. There were actually turf battles in the town when they opened, fighting with the local hospital. It turns out cataract surgery is a lucrative business and this place had a reputation for performing the surgery on people that had no need. For example, one man with perfect 20/20 vision in his other eye, was told that he should have the surgery in both eyes because that’s what a lot of people do.

Do you see the problem? The thing is, cataract surgery is a wonderful thing. People who need it, and get it, sing the praises of being able to see clearly again. But if you go into that place, and they tell you you need cataract surgery, do you believe them?

Office Practicum’s Web site is a sales tool to spread the message of their software to pediatric offices looking for practice management software. This is as it should be. But, if you read through it, you’ll find that almost all of the benefits sited for the vaccine management capability that VacLogic provides are related to increased profitability.

Here is the first paragraph on the Web site, their elevator pitch if you would.

Just below that is a circle with classic benefit feature marketing. Here is the benefit advertised for the feature at the top of the circle, represented by a dollar sign.

First in the circle to follow is their vaccine capability (which is implemented with VacLogic).

Imagine a young mother bringing her new born infant into a pediatric office, and learning of all the vaccines they want to give to her child. Imagine now that that office gives off the vibe of an organization trying to “reach (its) financial goals” and “improve (its) vaccine cash flow.”

Might she not trust them?

In all fairness, managing vaccine inventory is a huge problem for a pediatric office, as that is, I believe, their biggest expense after personnel. VacLogic allows them to make accurate forecasts of upcoming vaccinations needed for each child, and schedule visits and manage inventory accordingly.

There is good news on the OP Web site. Even though the OP Web site emphasizes the financial benefits of accurate vaccine analysis and forecast, the pediatricians talking in their video testimonials emphasize, instead, how glad they are to be able to ensure that their patients get the vaccinations they need when they need them.