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Can Recent MS Patents Affect Mono and DotGNU?
5p1urge asks: "I really love the Mono and DotGNU projects. As someone who's worked in Java for for over 5 years, I welcome C# and it's buddies to the OpenSource world. However, here's question: as far as I can tell, only the C# spec and System.* assemblies were submitted to ECMA and therefore made officially public. What happens when MS decides that, Linux -is- going to steal valuable income-generating business, and therefore it should use it's newly acquired patents to sue? I'd appreciate comments from IT lawyers / solicitors and individuals with experience in this area, as well as from the wider community. I'm asking this question because I want to code in mono / DotGnu but I'm cautious because I wonder if MS can take it away from us?"
Ballmer, Allchin and others have made it clear many times that they are using these patents to pursue the strategy against open source software outlined in the halloween papers. Patents are a not new way for software makers to gain control over other people's intellectual property. And not a common one at all. There are not many software makers which have engaged in an extensive patenting strategy like Microsoft. Most of the extensive patenters are large hardware makers. Microsoft was the only software maker at the 1994 USPTO hearings that advocated software patents.
There is no god
Come on! Even Bill Gates knows this one:
Microsoft went the ECMA route because it's faster and easier to get an ECMA standard passed than to go the ISO route, and once ECMA has passed the standard it's a heck of a lot easier to get it standardized by ISO. C# and the CLI are both ECMA and ISO standards. See ECMA and ISO/IEC C# and Common Language Infrastructure Standards. C# - ECMA-334, ISO/IEC 23270 CLI - ECMA-335, ISO/IEC 23271 CLI Technical Report - ECMA TR84, ISO/IEC 23272
That's happen before Zope became mature. Now the situation is turned for PHP. For example, the author of two famous PHP books and the original developer of the famous NeoBoard portal rewrote the whole thing from PHP to Zope.
Less is more !
I wont say stupid, but probably biased.
.NET can leverage native OS architecture quite efficiently. It simply blows Java Swing away in this area.
I'm a programmer / project manager ( / DBA, etc. ) for a very small shop. We write in house programs for specific industry requirements.
We've done stuff in Java; as an OOP advocate, I love Java. As project manager, I get blank stares from programmers that want the equivalent of visual basic to work in. We've now standardized on C#.NET. The programmers still look a little lost when I emphasize OO practices, but they're real happy with Visual Studio to hold their hands.
So,
Is it faster? Perhaps.
Remember, in a rich client GUI environment,
Is Development Faster ? YES.
Bash them all the you like. Microsoft's development tools have always been good. The Visual Studio suite is much better than any equivalent product I've seen.
Is it cross platform ? No
Yes, a big no here. However, expect to see the CLR running on platforms other than straight up Windows in the future. In the end, when most commercial clients run Windows this is more of a selling point than a detriment.
Does it do things that other languages cannot? No
Well, this can pretty much be said of any language. As a Java programmer, I really enjoy C#, it's does the same thing as Java, it just does it quite well for Windows.
Is it Encumbered By Patents? Yes
So? For OSS this doesn't fly, for the boss, this isn't really a consideration.
Definitely not true. Microsoft's first products were languages, and until the mid-1990s, it was their cash cow.
Office and consumer OSs are definitely the current cash cow, but I believe that the Dev Tools group is still in the black. It's not easy to figure out exactly how much they pull in from tools because in their financials it's lumped in a bunch of other things. However, in their latest 10k, revenue from "developer tools, training, certification, Microsoft Press and other services" was listed at US$1.016 BILLION. Yes, with a B.
How much of that is actual developer tools isn't clear, but that group as a whole (which includes CALs, licensing, etc.) made US$1.409 billion last year, and they're estimating US$1.848 billion this year.
The Register article is pointing at a patent APPLICATION. Despite their comment, "But an umbrella claim that protects its .NET APIs, granted last week, highlights the extent of its determination to protect its interfaces," I don't see any patent granted last week.
.NET API is even patentable. Certainly claim 1, as written, is not patentable: "1. A software architecture for a distributed computing system comprising: an application configured to handle requests submitted by remote devices over a network; and an application program interface to present functions used by the application to access network and computing resources of the distributed computing system." There are a zillion systems out there that match the terms of this claim precisely. So it is hardly novel.
It remains to be seen whether the
In fact the whole patent application is written so poorly that I can't see it being granted in anything like its present form. Maybe there is a way of patenting an API but this ain't it.
Come on! Even Bill Gates knows this one:
... is patenting as much as we can ... A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose."
"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today."
Bill Gates
You forgot the most important part of this quote...
"The solution
Therefore, I don't think Bill Gates knows this one, he seems to be all for patents.
Wrong.
Steve Ballmer has explicitly stated that free implementations of Dotnet will not be tolerated and that he will use patents to protect the "millions" invested.
Reference: Interview in May 2002 issue of IX Magazine (in German, excerpt here).
It's not an emerging technology and it won't change computing. There's nothing new in .net which isn't already present in Java, very little that wasn't already present in the UCSD p-system in 1973, and not a lot which wasn't already present in BCPLin 1967
The timeline goes like this:
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.