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SQL Server Developers Face Huge Royalties
superpat writes "The Register reports that Microsoft licensed SQL Server technology from Timeline. Trouble is, they didn't license the tech for use by MS customers... After 3 1/2 years in the courts, the final judgement rules that MS SQL Server customers must pay Timeline patent royalties. The argument that Microsoft said it was OK is no defence, apparently." News.com.com.com has another story.
Someone needs to start a list of companies Microsoft has screwed over. It needs to be the first site that comes up when someone googles for "Microsoft Business Partner"
Let's see:
Citrix ("Yes, we're building virtual desktops into Windows now...")
Sendo ("Hey, nice phone tech, we'll just be taking it, then. Enjoy your chapter 11.")
Timeline, Inc. (New, from article)
VMWare ("Oh, and virtual system imaging is going in, too. Thanks Connectix!")
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
How hard would it be for those companies using MS SQL to switch to a different SQL distro? That should eliminate the infringement, but how difficult is switch between one SQL distro and another?
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
The patent seems to govern the collecting of data from multiple sources and storing in staged areas for manipulation and/or writing back to the original database(s) or deploying to a new target (the example given is OLAP cubes).
I worked for Broadbase (when they were still Broadbase) and that seems to describe there ETL (analytics) pretty well. Mind you it also covers a whole raft of other ETL tools that are out there
--My sig is bigger than your sig--
They said people who 'added code' to the SQL server. Does this mean altering the source, or just using it from inside a program (ie, not SQL Explorer or whatever)?
The article says:
Who is to decide this? Another court ruling? MS? Timeline?
I don't even understand this enough for IANAL. I need a new acronym: IHNFCATL. (I have NFC about the law)
/syle
The memo I read talked about 511 patents covering clustering, programatically accessing database schema, etc, etc. Not only could it be a large amount of MS customers, but a large amount of RDBMS users in general - even those using OSS versions.
Probably because Timeline wouldn't sell out. The patents may be worth a lot more than MS was offering.
However, in a situation to where the customers had no way of knowing the goods were stolen (i.e. the difference between buying from some shady character next to a dark alley and Wal-Mart) then I fail to see how there can be a legal precedent to punish (or at least ONLY punish) the buyers. Granted, the argument that folks should pay attention to legal preceedings is valid to a point yet from an engineering perspective it is silly to force any architecture analysis to throw in a full legal and social analysis. Basically, MS should have made it CLEAR to its customers and potential customers. Because they did not do so then it falls to them to pay. IMHO what SHOULD happen is that MS has to pay in full and will have to recoup the costs from their customers through a separate court battle.
Users (and developers) should never have to worry about anything else except what is on the included license. If a company refuses to do its duty and inform customers of known flaws or problems then it is the company not the customer that is responsible. Let all those folks that have been using SQL Server for those years now get full or perhaps pro-rated refund. I would be happy to recommend PostgreSQL (or MySQL depending on what they were actually using SQL Server for)
Winners? Victors? I don't see any, I'm afraid.
Though this WAS worth a hell of a laugh.
Just my 1/250 of $5.00.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
Is nice to use the TCO argument against Microsoft.
"MS SQL Server initially cost less than Oracle, Informix, etc, but if you use some features you could face aditional costs".
Anyway, I don't think that this is the first time that Microsoft sold something that they don't really own.
I wonder if this news will slashdot mysql.com and postgresql.com with people looking to switch...
Liberty uber alles.
Also, in #1 the guy in the mall is still breaking the law, whether you should have known it or not does not absolve him. So it stands to reason that in #2, whether or not you should have known your use of the software would violate a patent, that still doesn't exculpate Microsoft, which seems to have acted in bad faith (and appears to have tried to practice law without a license by giving customers legal advice related to patents). How much longer are people going to trust Microsoft? They are either stupid, reckless, or downright shifty.
I do not have a signature
Really it more underscores the completely assinine idea of patenting software algorithms when it means patenting what is essentially mathematic formulae.
But still, if someone is going to get a beJebus sued out of them here its got to be Microsoft. Why you ask? Think of this little scenario.
Suppose Microsoft wants to target unofficial Xbox developers (Xbox Linux and the like). All they need to do is: Create a subsidiary, have them patent a piece of code, stick it in a desired product (bootloader anyone?) and open source it.
Then six months later they can sue the entire Xbox developers group into the poorhouse for not only using patented code but distributing it to potentially an enormous audience.
Suddenly Xbox Linux dies out.
If you read the article, Microsoft bought Timeline's biggest competitor and tried to develop technologies that would replace Timeline's. Amazingly, even though Microsoft has the resources to buy companies they can't develop anything worthwhile on their own?
This is a good example of what I call peeing in the pool. Timeline claims that because Microsoft is not a law firm, SQL developers who believed Microsoft's statements about SQL licensing were acting irresponsibly. Wow! Score one for the ludicrous vision of each of us having a lawyer accompanying us everywhere like a guide dog.
So SQL Server developers, fearing legal harassment, start lookin into alternatives like MySQL, encouraging the development of new features like triggers and native stored procedures, and making MySQL even more attractive as competition. See how IP encourages innovation? Uh, sort of?
For the more risk-conscious companies, there shouldn't be any difference. For the companies that still don't look at licenses, it doesn't make any difference.
For the companies that just now start looking at licenses, I see this as a good thing. After all, would you rather your boss be aware of the licensing options of OSS vs the licensing options of other software, or would you rather him blindly choose one or the other?
I say that awareness is a better solution, and the fact that he's aware of the EULA will encourage him to shop around.
Manager's will still make a decision yea or nay based on their own reasons (or reasons handed to them), but at least it's not as much of a shot in the dark.
What's this Submit thingy do?
I never understood the Spyglass thing. Here's why: Microsoft, in court, has admitted that their browser is an absolutely integral part of the operating system. Therefore, Internet Explorer costs $250 a copy for the client versions, and something like $800 a copy for server products. Shouldn't Spyglass have made out great with that, or did Microsoft rewrite the rendering engine from scratch at some point?
Absolutely correct. Mod the above comment up.
Microsoft has stolen plenty of IP from company after company, but they are too powerful for many to go after. Even when one does and wins, M$ will not honor a legal decision but will juet keep fighting it and continue to sell the stolen technology while they do. Take for example Stac Electronics vs. Microsoft; they won their case and got a judgement against Microsoft, but ended up accepting much less than the judgement and giving the company to Microsoft, clearly because Microsoft let them know it would never honor the judgement but just cost them more than they could afford to try to collect it.
What Timeline is doing might not look so great if you are a M$ SQL user, but by taking on the burden of going after all the M$ SQL users, they are putting much more presure on M$ than they could have ever done by going after them directly. I applaud them. It would be wonderful if everyone Microsoft stole from had the resources to do this. The fallout to M$ from lots of upset customers (and likely some state AG offices) suing them will be far greater than from one Company that they know they can kill in legal costs.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
...And then Microsoft would be in the unenviable position of advising its customers to migrate to free Sybase for Linux (11.0.3.3), since it is compatible with SQL Server 6.5.
Why isn't Sybase having this problem? SQL Server and Sybase were at one time the same product (v 4.8).
They do pay whopping big (by normal standards) fines. The problem is that MS has something like $4 billion in the bank, so even the harshest fines don't faze them.
Personally, I think that taking Microsoft's money isn't punishment enough, future fines should have to be paid in patents. If the feds levy a $5 million fine on MS next year, they should have to go through their patent portfolio and release $5 million worth of IP to the public domain.
0 1 - just my two bits
Bad faith is "not simply bad judgment or negligence, but rather it implies the conscious doing of a wrong" -- Black's Law Dictionary.
Microsoft is not legal counsel, so any reference to them has no standing in a bad faith claim. It's the same as asking your dead grandmother via seance if she thinks it's ok. In fact I bet the Microsoft EULA specifically disclaims patent liability issues of this type.
I find this case highly ironic because it has been Microosft who has been making claims about use of Open Source being dangerous from a potential patent infringement point of view. Now they are found to have a problem.
Patents should be treated like trademarks. If you fail to vigorously defend your trademark, you lose it. If patents were treated the same way, this might put an end to patent mills, and it would also prevent someone from patenting an idea, sitting on it while someone else unknowingly develops an infringing product, and then extorts money from them in the form of royalties after the product is proven successul.
Anyone really believe that Microsoft was unaware that they were selling product features that they had no right to sell? Anyone believe they will compensate the injured clients without a long legal process?
Using open souce software won't solve the fundemental problem here.
Sure, Microsoft potentially screwed their customers. They'll fix it. Reason? If they don't, then *noone* will buy their software anymore. Stuff like this could kill Microsoft if they don't deal with it. No worries, either way.
I own a small software company. I use microsoft sql-server (and, honestly, don't have much of a choice if I want to *sell* my software, but that's a whole different problem). Without reading the patents, I have no clue if my software infringes on Timeline's patents.
But then again, none of us have any clue if MySQL violates patents. I'm willing to bet that it does. Someone out there has a patent for pretty much everything. Even if the code was written on a planet orbiting Vega, and, assuming for the moment that no-one on Vega's planet ever even heard of the earth, they could still write code on their computers (go with it, they have computers, ok?) that do something substantially similar to something that someone has patented.
It's a fundemental flaw in our patent system... and ignorance is no excuse.
Most software developers just ignore the whole thing, thinking (and in general, rightfully so) that they are safe if they didn't steal an idea from somewhere. And they are safe. No one notices most infringments. Occasionally, if you make it big, someone will notice your infrigement, and will basically want a piece of your action (i.e., a big settlement) and they will get it... even though you didn't steal the idea, you invented it yourself. Hopefully you can find prior art.
For what it's worth: this only seems for US citisens, since f.e. in europe we don't have software patents nor are we affected by US only patents.
Futhermore, how can a USER of a piece of software, which the user licensed in full (payed a license fee to MS), still be charged for patent-infrigment while USING the piece of software? This doesn't make sense. IF there is one company who has to pay for this patent infrigment, it's Microsoft: after all, it's not the end-user's problem MS didn't license enough from Timeline so the end-user is licensing software from MS which in fact isn't covering the whole package.
What also seems odd is that the article mentiones SqlServer '7', not SqlServer 2000. '7' had an Add-on OLAP package while SqlServer 2000 has everything integrated. IANAL but this seems only to be about the add-on OLAP package for SqlServer 7, not about the integrated logic in SqlServer 2000.
To the people who don't have a clue about databases and cry about MySql: please... come back when MySql has the features SqlServer provides.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Because that's how patents work.
.gif / LZW / Unisys fiasco. They had a patent on using a compression technique, and everyone who supported that technique had to pay a license fee. And the end-user was the one responsible for verifying that their gif encoder was licensed correctly, not the producer of the program.
They have a patent on use of a process, and the use of that process without a license is a violation of the patent.
Just because someone sold you a device that allows you to do the process does not give you a license for the process.
Just like Dell isn't responsible if you write or use software that violates someone else's patent on a computer they built. They aren't even responsible if someone has a patent on using RAID for a specific application, and they sell you a RAID machine.
Unfortionately, this rapidly degenerates to making any development nearly impossible as you have to do a patent search for every thing your company does. Or else you just do it, and worry about the licensing later.
And software patents are even worse, because there are hundreds of things you could be violating, some of which might even be created by the interaction of different groups that aren't even aware of the others' actions.
Witness the
SKG
But how are customers supposed to know of a patent infringement if they don't have access to the code in order to inspect it?
Are we, the clients, going to have to start investigating the history of such software and reviewing the licenses over every piece of software that came into contact with the prospective product before we can even consider a purchase?
This is not a victory for anybody other than Timeline. This is a step backwards for the consumer. The customer can no longer rely on the developer producing an honest product because the developer is no longer liable.
It wasn't the murder's fault he killed, it was the people who knew him whom he never told he was a murder. They're responsible and they must do the time for him.
This is ludicrous.
IF microsoft DID in fact mis-represent themselves to their clients about their legal ability to write custom code on top of SQL server and market it themselves, then I believe (IANAL) that that is FRAUD, my friends. Yes our old friend FRAUD. Now my interpretation of how this can play out is this:
1) Developers violating patents must pay. They must pay without protest
2) Said developers should be able to collectively or individually SUE Microsoft for fraud. For specifically the amount of the patent payments.
This seems like an end around Justice, but I believe that the two issues are separate. Simply because Microsoft chose to misinterpret the licencing agreement, does not mean that the developers are free to do whatever they want, but IF they were told that they could do so, the developers have a case to make that MICROSOFT should be responsible for said costs.
Just my $.0002 (adjusted for inflation)
hmmmm?