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Microsoft Applies For .NET Patent
Wojina writes "Microsoft has applied for a comprehensive patent on what appears to be the entire implementation of the .NET CLR (Common Language Runtime) and the framework APIs. Microsoft's CLR is an implementation of the CLI (submitted to ECMA for standardization). Does this bode ill for the Mono project? See the CNET News story." And a chaser: Nept points to this interesting Microsoft-funded .NET obfuscation project.
Linux has had platform independent coding since the days of Java,
Back up, most unix-ish C code can be compiled on any vaguely unix-like system with very little modification. I'd call that platform independence, wouldn't you?
Imagine that, and without the overhead of a bloated VM to slow things way down.
Patents have become an increasingly common way for software makers to exert control over their intellectual property.
They may also be doing it to prevent or reduce somebody else from filing a similar patent against them. IOW, protecting their own ass from stupid lawsuits. Thus, it is kind of hard to assertain the real motivation behind such.
Table-ized A.I.
"if you were to look at Microsoft as a person in your life, you'd wonder what was wrong with him or her such that so much had to be controlled by that person."
thats where miguel has gone wrong. you should not be investing in a project that relies on the continued good will of MS. especially if that project is esentially aiming to take some control away from redmond
"castles made of sand, melt into the sea, eventually"
'Be the change you want to see in the world' - Al Gore
Microsoft's CEOs have made it "patently" clear that they intend to restrict competing .Net implementations by cultivating Microsoft's patents, such as United States Patent Application #20020059425 "Distributed computing services platform" which covers the design and inter-operation of .NET based implementations.
Although there is prior art examples of individual technologies such as the JVM etc, Microsoft patents such as the one mentioned, define and claim the interoperation of the components, in such a way that any re-implementations will be sure to be covered by the patents. This remains true even for the Microsoft specs submited to standard
In comparison, Sun has granted the Apache and all open source developers FULL access to the specs, test kits and granted the full rights to develop competing products under the JSPA . Sun has also fully pened up the Java development standards process under the new Java Community Process (JCP) . Even to the point of granting full open source re-implentations of J2EE such as JBoss ...
There those that claim that .NET is open to re-implementation, but until Microsoft make a simliar public legal declaration to Sun's JSPA, any .NET reimplementation represents a pending legal mindfield.
You are mistaken. The parent requested examples of occassions when Microsoft has actually pursued an incident of patent infringement by means of litigation, not claims that they would pursue them.
The parent was mistaken in thinking that I had said Microsoft had a history of using Patent litigation as a means to chill Free Software, and in thinking that only a past history of filing patent suits against other companies was relevant in determining their intentions. I had said we can infer Microsoft's intentions based upon their past predatory actions. Microsoft's repeated criminal abuse of its Monopoly status, its actions towards Netscape, Java, DR-DOS, Stac, and countless other products, along with the threatening language they've used towards free software projects like those cited in my post, can be used to easily infer Microsoft's likely intentions.
It's entirely acceptable for any corporation to publicly declare that they would pursue patent infringement in court, because otherwise they would be opening themselves up to shareholder lawsuits. They have a covenant with shareholders to earn money, and not piss it away by allowing their competition to infringe on their patents.
It's entirely legal and acceptable yes, but it is not necessary to prevent shareholder lawsuits. Patents do not need to be enforced to remain valid, unlike Trademarks. Microsoft holds a number of very broad patents which any number of companies could be said to violate, and yet they are not enforcing them. The CIFS licence patent mentioned above is available for use royalty-free, as long as the software is not covered by the GPL or LGPL. By your logic, the shareholders should be sueing Microsoft for not charging royalties to every company making use of that patent, but that hasn't happened at all. And the same example does demonstrate Microsoft's use of patents to hinder the Free Software community.