Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Assembles Patent Arsenal for Longhorn
stock writes "The heat is on. Inside eweek.com are some remarkable articles: 'You see, Microsoft is busy patenting everything it can lay its hands on with
all three. In fact, Microsoft is now building up its patent arsenal, applying
for a rather amazing 10 patents a day. The idea isn't to ensure that
Microsoft makes a fair profit from its patents; it's to make sure that no one
else can write fully compatible software.' An older article mentions some other patents."
And the plot thickens... They are doing this (as the article states) to keep Linux and other OSs from being compatible. By breaking their network filesystems they force people to upgrade, stay away from free alternatives, and make more and more money.
This will also be to make sure that DRM can succeed. If there were ways around their "innovations" for security what good would it do? First thing you have to do is break networking and make sure that only other secured machines can talk.
Remember people: the end of computing as we know it is coming fast.
I'm applying for a patent on my business model which involves abusing American Intellectual Property law by filing endless frivolous patents. (I'm hoping MS and SCO don't try to claim prior art.)
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
This has been a tactic of many companies over the years, the only thing different about this is the fact that some of the patents that MS is getting approved have prior art conflicts.
sin
Merf
Why do we let a convicted monopolist obtain patents?
It seems a no brainter that they should not be allowed to protect any IP until a nonmonopolistic market restored.
"Right to innovate" be damned. You illegally got in top, now you can be made to share the top spot, a la the Sherman Act.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
If its on Slashdot, it MUST be true. No other evidence is needed.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
So many patents, not even their core programmers will be able to make compatible programs within itself.
...use the courts. Admittedly, the government is responsible for laying out and enforcing the underlying rules of the market, but abuses can occur. I think it is not to much of a stretch to say that standards available to everyone -- starting with ASCII and progressing forward to HTML, XML, SVG, and others -- are what have made it possible for computers to be successful. You think we'd have the Internet if it weren't for the various RFCs being made available to everyone? Hell no.
This is an act of desparation, but that doesn't mean it won't have deleterious effects upon the market as a whole. And you KNOW that the overburdened patent office won't be able to properly check all these for the existence of prior art, which I'd bet would cause 99% of these patents to be rejected.
After all there already have been various lawsuits against MS which have forced them to cough up some serious $$$. They do have a right to protect themselves against a broken patent system.
Nothing to see here. Just another sure sign that antitrust has no effect on the paranoid Microsoft.
Heck, IMO, this is a sure sign of the problems with software patents. In normal due process you should not be able to patent as much as that in that sort of time, unless something is up with the system.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Patents and monopolistic lock-in is the only way MS can compete with Linux (or any other decent OS). They know they are going down, they are just trying to slow the process.
The idea isn't to ensure that Microsoft makes a fair profit from its patents; it's to make sure that no one else can write fully compatible software.
Thank you slashdot, but I can think for myself. I'd rather have the bare facts (which speak for themselves) than a link with some anti-MS spin.
Gates and Co. didn't get rich by giving away software. This approach seems to have worked well for them in the past.
Live wrong, impostor.
Is it news Microsoft engaging monopolist practices?
Are they going to break all compatibility with their older OSs? If they don't, can't Linux/OS X/etc. still connect? If they do, don't they risk pissing off businesses?
I recognise that there are lots of important uses for linux-windows compatibility, but none of them apply to me personally.
sometimes it seems like loads of effort is spent trying to reproduce windows instead of just doing something better and it doesn't always seem worth it.
take wine for example, a good project but imo it could never be anything more than a "cheap and dirty" temporary fix anyway.
If that doesn't count as anticompetitive behavior, I don't know what does.
I see this as good news for the future, since the repercussions on MS should be more severe than last time.
For the short term, everyone keep an eye on their applications, and look for prior art!
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
It will be really interesting to hear Miguel's views on this! Earlier on, he stated that MS patents wouldn't be an obstacle for Mono and .Net based development on non-MS platforms...
(Assuming this is correct, of course - may be a big assumption...)
Did they learn _nothing_ from Thomas Penfield Jackson? At all?
Bush and others like him won't be in the Whitehouse for ever. As soon as there's a DoJ who are actually prepared to enforce anti-trust laws rather than mistakenly believing that monopolies are good for innovation and the economy, any company that has amassed a portfolio that simply stops anyone interoperating with their systems will get taken down, quickly.
It's rather frustrating to see continued blatant monopoly abuse from MS. Hopefully, a sensible DoJ will eventually have so much ammunition from the last few years that MS' break-up becomes utterly inevitable.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Interesting...so what's the plan for that other bastion of patents-out-the-wazoo, IBM? You know, the Linux hero in corporate clothing?
/. any more...pointless and uninteresting articles with scant information (especially from Michael), and futile arguments and knee-jerk paranoid reactions masquerading as discussion.
See, this is why I barely come to
too bad the gov can't reject the patent applications because MS is a monopoly ... i think some antitrust laws need to be changed
As a Microsoft shareholder I'm very happy to read about this. As a leading independant consultant in the IT industry I'm disgusted by this.
Warmest regards,
--Jack
Wagner LLC Consulting Co. - Getting it right the first time
One very good reason to patent everything possible and build up a huge patent portfolio is to defend oneself against patent infringement lawsuits. If you own a lot of patents, chances are better that anyone suing you for patent infringement will themselves be infringing on your patents, giving you the means to settle without being extorted with huge licensing fees (like Eolas dinged Microsoft for).
Man, this makes me sick to my stomach and makes me suspect that RMS is right on. i mean this is just above and beyond "protecting an idea". This just sounds like blanket-patenting. It'll tie up the patent office (that is already over loaded) and muck up the legal system in a few years (in a few? it's a done deal already, i think ;-)
i say it's akin to the myriad of "crap laws" still on the books: you *will* get fucked if you piss off the wrong person with enough money for you are *always* violating some moronic law. So it will go with this, write most any software and, "i'll be damned, who'd have patented that?!" It'll be interesting to see where this leads in the next few years.
The justice dept really blew it, they made a huge mistake of going after an unrealistic break up when instead they should have gone after full disclosure and forcing M$ to insure and help with interoperablility. Instead Billy, Steve and the boys got of Scott free.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
if there was an alternative desktop OS that was just as good if not better, this wouldn't matter.
This is one of those articles where everyone gets to rehash the same old MS bashing. Then, they all get modded up. Easier for me to read because all the responses are 5, Interesting. When can we get our next iTunes article?
A url to some of the new Longhorn-features (a 60 minute video)
m l= episodes/en/20031028LHORNDB/manifest.xml
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdntv/episode.aspx?x
Quite interesting showing how development can be done with the new technology..
Oh, hush.
This, to me, looks like irrefutable evidence of anticompetitive behavior. For the next antitrust trial.
(Why do I feel so optimistic all of a sudden?)
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Is it just me, or is this article spreading the same FUD that we have come to expect from the pro-Microsoft side? It is one thing to dislike Longhorn because of its DRM, but quite a stretch to believe that Microsoft will patent every common computing process used in Longhorn.
Unlike what most here probably believe, patents are not the problem. Microsoft will not be able to patent Linux out of existence.
----- It's Intuitively Obvious, and can be proved with Mathematical Induction!
I guess when Microsoft hands over a stack of patent applications, we should respond with a stack of examples of prior art (surely they must exist)? Either that or start applying for patents first and if they're granted make them publicly licensed under certain conditions (e.g. for OSS)? Of course, that makes open source the demon... argh.
Of course, knowing the patent office, they'll just rubber stamp Microsoft's applications. Right next to 1-Click and that new method of swinging one.
they're just doing it so some other company can't patent it later and sue them?
slashdot, news for crazed liberal socialist zealots
There are many reasons companies patent things, ranging from the defensive to the offensive. Unfortunately it's hard to tell a priori what the actual reasons are.
This seems like microsoft has sidestepped their previous antitrust issues with the patent process, Would this be considered antitrust behavior if they use those patents to hurt competition?
Im unclear if this would be considered the same thing, perhaps prior art could be used to stop blatant misuse, but it would give them an advantage...
Does IBM patent things with the idea that they can then use the patents to prevent other people's software from interacting with their own?
There are four boxes used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order.
Back in the day when a Microsoft 'operating system' was barely more than a DOS shell, we used to joke at all the functionality that was missing. At each step of the way, any new functionally added was seen as wrong-headed and anti-competitive. Finally, lowly MS can proudly point to an operating system(2003) and a software architecture(.Net) so good it almost makes you forget COM. If you're going to catch grief no matter what you do, better to keep adding functionality and let the whiners whine.
This is primarily the fault of our stupid patent law, which doesn't give someone the right to produce something, only the right to keep other's from producing it.
Sample output:
e-commerce
e-communism
e-constipation
e-conifer
one-click shopping
one-click shipping
one-clock shopping
one-click slapping
BASIC
ADA
difference engine
mouse
rat
.....
Not only this, but it can generate 1,400 patent applications per day, all conveniently dated to 1878 so you can beat everyone to the punch. Microsoft "Created" this after it embraced and extended a third-party password-guesser program.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
The end of the patent system is coming first! We've known this was comming since 98, where's the news?
This approach could backfire on Microsoft.
Large users of MS software now understand Microsoft's game. Go back five years or so and many didn't get it, or didn't care. But they've seen how lock-in allows MS to turn the screws on the when it comes to licencing.
It wouldn't suprise me if a lot of organisations decide to stop at Windows XP for as long as possible, rather than go to Longhorn, to avoid the tighter MS handcuffs of Longhorn.
Now wait a sec.... DRM only works if the copyrighted materials are FOR CHARGE, right? I'm no expert, but it seems to me that if DRM starts forcing people to BUY -everything-, what the anti-RIAA zealots have been preaching for the last few years will come true - I suspect people will begin exploring alternatives (independants, etc) en masse'.
Same thing with OSS..... sure, DRM is great... EVERYONE has rights to this software....
Economically, I belive this will eventually fall flat on it's face.
10 patents a day is not that much for the USPTO... if they only had competent patent examiners. Hmmm, is Microsoft DDoSing the USPTO in order to slip in patents based on prior art?
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
"Microsoft are working to maintain their monopoly".
In other news:
"The sky is blue, and grass is green" claims top scientist.
"Water is wet" according to dolphins.
Trusted computing, bytecode boxes, XML, NTFSv2 w/Axcess extension, "Now swaps everythin gout of memory for no apparent reason, and then back again, and out again... IN EVERYDAY COMPUTNG!" (its a feature, swear), breaking most 3rd party apps, and re-writing allmost all of their code when they had just started to really weed the bugs out of their old code?
Microsoft, thank you for making the world a better place. Maybey in your nest life you'll realize that radical steps should be taken incrementally, not all at once.
Seriously, this seems like it could backfire on them, badly. They seem to want to create something perfect right off te bat.
Even God took six steps to make the universe as we know it.
--
I learend there tare troubles
Of more than one kind.
Some come from ahead
And some come from behind.
But I've bought a big bat.
I'm all ready, you see.
Now my troubles ar going
To have troubles with me!
~Dr. Seuss
md5sum
d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
except it is not a monopoly. There goes your rant, deflated by the truth. If it were a monopoly, you would have no Mac OS X or any versions of OSS operating systems.
"Hopefully, a sensible DoJ will eventually have so much ammunition from the last few years that MS' break-up becomes utterly inevitable."
Hopefully, Microsoft will fall apart as others make better products. The DOJ should totally butt out.
I think Bill's finally lost that grasp. And I don't think anyone here should let this be a concern - in fact, it's an ultimately good thing.
Longhorn is still two years away. Linux is getting better and better and the endless virus plagues are beginning to get to mom and joe user. If Longhorn comes on the market with an entirely new, relatively backwards incompatible system (like XP was - the XP "emulation" engine doesn't even work as well as WINE on, for example, Am. McGee's "Alice") all this lockdown is going to come back to haunt them. Does no one remember the early PC wars and two little computer companies named Apple and IBM? Yeah, they're both still around - but I don't think I need to tell you which one became the standard bearer. Does no one remember why?
Microsoft is making the exact same mistakes IBM made twenty five years ago. So just shut up with the complaints lest you reopen that crack uncle bill is fixing in his door...
There is no way MS will get away with creating a system that is not backward compatible/interoperable with server architectures. There are too many companies installing linux for their back end systems and lots of time between now and Longhorn to increase those numbers and they aren't going to replace those just to upgrade. So MS will make sure they are backward compatible, however, non MS clients won't work with Windows servers. This will bolster Linux on the server side and Windows on the desktop. But they will both lose out on the other side.
Tim
A lot of the articles focus seems to be on WinFS.
/. no doubt) that claimed that WinFS might be dumped to get their overall schedule back on track.
I can remember reading an article a while back on Longhorns schedule (linked from
Does anyone know if this is true, or just my imagination running away with itself.
[ Monday is a terrible way to spend one seventh of your life. ]
You am master of goodly english!
"Water are wet" according to dolphins"
I can find prior art for the Blue Screen of Death. Patent Denied! YUKRAINE IS NOT WEAK!!
Repant. Thy end is sheer.
Is direct filesystem access really a must? With the price of boxes, are dual boot systems really a compelling business case? (I like them, but I have a house full of junk computers hehe)
Microsoft will have to play nice with the network, additionally, by the time longhorn comes out there may be enough samba servers around that compatibility (on the client side) may be important. Do you really have to be at version X of SMB fileservices with any given version of Microsofts software? Sure there are going to be shops that want the 100 percent Microsoft solution, but if Linux/BSD is up to it, theres nothing saying that in a few years running OSS will simply be the competitive thing to do.
Clearly Microsoft isn't going to lower their prices, not with this monster of a development project pigging out on excess product release schedules.
With Mono, compatibility was always a matter of how much paranoia the developers could tolerate in their planning.
As for patents, Microsoft is only doing what the patent office allows.
The most comfortable way to maintain a monopoly is to use the monopoly powers provided by law. That's what a patent is. I'm amazed it took so long for Microsoft to learn that.
I hope that someday soon Congress will understand the seriousness of the current problems with software patents AND give a damn. Microsoft and other companies are patenting tens of thousands of software ideas, almost all of them obvious and/or existing in prior art, and despite their invalidity, it'll still take more money than any of us has to fight them. Reading a random selection of the software patents that have been granted recently would make me pass out with laughter if they didn't threaten my own freedom to innovate.
"Welcome...to the end of the computer age! MUHAHAHAHA!"
Wouldn't building up such a huge patent arsenal actually work against their interests? This would seem to be pro-Linux in that if I, as a developer, want to make software that people can use, without fear of litigation, move to Linux. The relatively small number of Linux users is only growing, and sooner or later it will reach a critical mass where the "average" user will now see real competition with Microsoft in the consumer space. If I were a Linux PR guy, I would try to spin this as "Microsoft Bad For Innovation" or the like.
Seems like a big mistake to me to do this.
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
I really think Microsoft is making a bad call here. But then again, they have known how to secure sales in the past, more than anyone else. Time will tell whether they will be able to continue to charge ridiculous amounts of money for Windoze and Office.
"Interesting...so what's the plan for that other bastion of patents-out-the-wazoo, IBM?"
Well at the moment they are about to bend SCO over a court bench. Also they seem to have been behaveing themselfs recently...
And by all means let the times you visit get fewer and fewer
The fewer M$ fan boys here the better.....
Article quote: Now, after having their hands gently slapped by the Department of Justice, the boys from Redmond have another plan: Make it so that users of their next desktop system won't be able to use non-Microsoft-blessed servers or programs at all.
What utter FUD this is. This is nonsense of the highest degree, it suggests that Microsoft will not only shut out every independent developer on the planet (i.e. nobody who isn't "blessed by" Microsoft can write software for this thing) but also prevent users from accessing their network infrastructure. What gobshite. People will still be able to write software for Windows, people who use Windows will still be able to use the Internet, FTP to and from Linux boxes, and communicate with Samba servers. I am no authority on this, but if Microsoft prevented people from doing said things then:
1. Nobody would use Windows.
2. Windows Longhorn would not be able to access shares and resources on Windows 2000/NT/XP hosts.
Also, people like Mozilla and Open Source are frightened, according to this article. They're building up defenses! Hah. Many companies who are NOT open source use portable windowing toolkits for cross platform compatability. Look at Adobe -- all its products that run on Windows do NOT use the standard Windows widget set, or look at Macromedia -- same there.
So Microsoft's covering it's ass with patents. Plenty of people have done this in the past. Perhaps Linux and the Open Source community should be doing it first.
This is mostly off topic but seeing as how most software patents that make it to Slashdot are frivolous and have a long history of prior art, why has no one gone through this:
http://www.nist.gov/dads/
and patented everything in there? At the time the algorithm or data structure was created, it was a novel invention. Hell any algorithm is novel otherwise it wouldn't be worth learning in school right?
I think I'm gonna patent calculus and see how far I can get with it.
However, holding patents for defensive purposes isn't much use against pure "IP litigation" companies.
:-)
Since these companies don't produce actual products they can't be caught out for infringing any of your patents.
It's only really useful against other large companies (e.g. IBM) since it gives you better bargaining power for cross-licensing. And for locking out new competitors, of course
Starting to make the prior article about tiger better and better. This is why I switched to Linux and OS X and also why I will not be going back anytime soon.
The net effect of the current patent/copyright frenzy will be quite simple...
Progress will move away from the US and EU, and into India and China.
Both may be signatories to WIPO treaties, but IIUC they're not leading the charge. Both run rampant with piracy, though at the moment that seems to be passed off as an 'enforcement difficulty.' By the time we quit pussy-footing around, I expect both economies to have grown enough, and be busy enough modernizing their own nations that they'll be able to just chuck ^H^H^H^H^H withdraw regrettfully from the IP treaties, or renegotiate them. In any event, THEY'LL have the innovative lead, at that point.
Others have mentioned the IP-restrictive environment of New York being responsible for the rise of Hollywood.
IP laws, they way they're being misused today, circumscribe the pie so IP owners can own bigger chunks of it. Growth in the pie itself will happen elsewhere.
Oh yes, IMHO patents and copyrights were meant to compensate inventors and artists for their creative effort, and keep them in the creative business. For far too many copyrights and patents, the main expense is in filing, and the creative effort was trivial. The competitive roadblock is the reason. IMHO, this is abusive and retards progress in the US.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Corporations are commonly plural in British English. You is wrong.
Done. There is no microsoft monopoly anymore. You can now run OS-X or other non-MS operating systems on your Apple Macintosh. You can now run FreeBSD and Red Hat Linux on your PC. In another breakthrough, an alternative PDA OS called "Palm" has been introduced, so no-one has to use WinCE anymore.
First Patented Post.
The USPTO only has one type of patent. The "I want a monopoly on this" patent. There should be defensive patents, patents issued saying "we figured out how to do this on our own, we don't want to stop other people form figuring out the same thing we just don't want to be prevented from using our inventions." The cost should be (much) lower and they should be approved faster and nobody should own them. That way you know right off what's going on.
I also like the proposed reforms making large companies who apply for lots of patents pay much more and individuals pay much less.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
Of course patents don't give you the right to produce something.
Many other regulations (environmental impact, etc...) factor into whether you are allowed to make something.
For instance, you are perfectly allowed to patent a new invention which can only be produced in a way which produces highly toxic waste. Without appropriate permits and disposal plans you will not be allowed to produce your invention.
The only possible point of a patent (or having a system of patents) is to limit what others can produce. Where is the -10, What are you talking about? moderation button?
While I am going to start with the disclaimer: I am NOT comparing Gates to Hitler or Software Patents to the Holocaust.
The guy that runs the VA Holocaust Museum in Richmond, VA, spent like, a year as a child living in a potatoe cellar dug into a field in eastern europe to escape the SS and certain death. When he asks tour groups "do you think that the holocaust could ever happen again?" they say no. Predicibly, they answer the same when he asks "do you think it could ever happen in the USA?"
He then gets rather livid. You would think that people who hear stories from previous visiters would have figured it out. He insists, and rightly so, that as soon as you write it off as a possibility, and say "it'll never happen here," or "never again, anywhere," that is exactly when it will. There are evil people and there are stupid people. Evil people prey on stupid people, and that is how they get away with it.
Don't let yourself be caught unaware. Don't let your guard down. Otherwise, Nazism can rise again, Communism can rise again, Islam could conqure Europe again, or Microsoft could take away our ability to exercise freedom of speach and press by controlling the only medium available with a still-low-enough barrier to entry. The death camps wouldn't have been possible without IBM. Who knows where we are being forced to goto today?
We need to nuke'em and we need to nuke'em NOW!
This is part of an emerging strategy that a friend of mine explained to me. In the past Microsoft has competed in the marketplace. In the future they will compete in the courthouse. Would-be competitors will be sued before their products gain enough of a following to be a threat. Microsoft's lawyers will tromp around beating their chests and making threats intended to intimidate others much the same way that the "church" of $cientology's lawywers persecute those who speak out about the cult's abuses and fundamentally evil nature. Microsoft is pursuing these fraudulent and frivilous patents because it costs money to defend against patent suits. Microsoft will not really care whether they win or lose the court case because the purpose of the suits and the threats of being sued is to intimidate their competitors and force them to tie up resources they cannot afford in their legal defense. This is exactly what CLABS did to Aureal a few years ago, filed phony patent suits and used the courts to bankrupt the company.
This really worries me because if blatant fraud and deceit become accepted business practices that are allowed to succeed, what does that say about the state of our civilization?
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Oh no, of course not.
IBM is a guardian of open systems and the free exchange of ideas.
If IBM had its way, your PC would be a glorified 3270 emulator connecting to some AS/400 or Mainframe.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Granted its an op-ed piece, but so many unsubstantiated claims, so many incorrect assumptions, so many outright falsehoods?
Yet so many of you will eat this stuff up and take it as the gospel. Try re-reading that story with a critical, objective mind (if you can) and then see how you feel. (It will help to actually know something about the Longhorn production schedule, common business practices, and the legal system in general).
You won't get much truth from eweek on any subject.
I fully agree.
Also, having read the article, it seems to me that the author's comments about Microsoft only doing it to scupper OSS is only his opinion, not _fact_.
Wasn't it Red Hat that patented and then explained that they were only doing it so others couldn't snap up the 'goods' ? I can't see why MS would not want to do the same. That's the idea of patents, to protect ones ideas so that others cannot capitalise from them.
And as MS is a company that owes it's shareholders the best chance of a return, surely it is obliged to patent key technologies ?
Yeah, but you would think that even ten a week would be a problem. After all, time-consuming research is needed to ensure nothing non-novel pass into the patent pool.
However, Microsoft solved that by buying their own patent examiners. Much faster and smoother that way.
That's why my question used the present tense, and not the past... we all know the used to be huge assholes, so, have they changed?
There are four boxes used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order.
At one time they did.
Read the book: Big Blue: IBM's use and abuse of power.
This book is literally an education on monopolist behavior. If you read it, you would amazed at how many of IBM's dirty tricks are practiced by Microsoft.
One very important lesson. The monopoly and especially lock in are the most important things. Even more important than short term profitability. Even more important than staying within the law.
After all the law will do is fine you. Maybe even painfully. But in the end, you still have a monopoly with locked in customers. You can charge what economists call "monopoly rents". So you're still in control of the game. Nothing is more important than maintaining the monopoly.
Anyway, I'm off topic. But the book is a very interesting read of things done in decades past that many here are too young to remember.
The price of freedom is eternal litigation.
the patent office really needs to charge large corporations more for filing multiple patents. Especially if a patent was found to be frivilous. That is the only way, it will discourage companies from filing stupid, bogus patents that have tons of prior art.
There's no need to register such patents. Just publish the information. If there's a dispute having a patent isn't better than having prior art. The debate is still about what infringes what. Of course Microsoft doesn't contribute much to the state of the art by publish. Some, but not very much.
funny, thats exactly what i do for a living... make glorified dumb terminals that connect to big servers.
... hi bingo
Talk about putting the "Arse" in Arsenal!
This will also be to make sure that DRM can succeed.
And the continuing raft of viruses and worms will be used to help usher in the DRM age.
But I have to question whether it will really succeed.
DRM is being driven not by demand from consumers but from owners of copyrights. That's not exactly a recipe for success. It sounds to me like it will be as much a rousing success as DAT and for the same reasons.
Despite a deployment of DRM with euphemisms that most consumers aren't expected to understand and possibly low introductory prices on DRM-protected content, I foresee a lot of folks annoyed with the restrictions more than they are joyed by the content.
I still advocate calling the technology for the dog it is Content Use Restriction or CUR. It's designed to bite the unwitting.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
There is already an easy way to do just that. Publish a so-called defensive publication, in one of journals USPTO (as well as researchers) read and use for their prior-art evaluation process. It's too bad not more companies and individuals know this, but it is a practice some (big) companies do use, as it is significantly cheaper than doing full patent application.
Or, rather than profit motive or monopoly propagation, it could be option #3: Microsoft may just not want a repeat of the Eolas debacle where they get sued for something seemingly public domain 5 years down the road. Many companies (IBM comes to mind) maintain huge patent stables for precisely this purpose.
There are many reasons companies patent things, ranging from the defensive to the offensive. Unfortunately it's hard to tell a priori what the actual reasons are.
Unfortunately Microsoft has already told us exactly what they plan to do. I forget which one of the "Haloween" documents it was, but in one of them they clearly made the point that the most effective tool to combat against Open Source software, including Linux, was through intellectual property, and specifically patents.
In that light, the article makes perfect sense, including the reasons why Microsoft is patenting everything they can. It's just part of the war plan they have to battle Linux and Open Source software. What better way than to "innovate" in such a way that is incompatible with previous releases, and then patent the methodology so that it becomes difficult to impossible to create a competing method without violating a patent of some kind or another.
. 62,400 repetitions make one truth -- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Wow, what an effort and a change in strategy. Microsoft made its mint by being proprietary, but sort-of compatible with their old products while embracing and extending other people's killer apps.
Now, with every other OS based on a *nix core, not only does Microsoft continue to ignore this trend but they try to 'go it alone' and isolate themselves through locking down their interfaces with patents and tough to engineer interfaces. Sounds like the Great Wall of China, and that set back China a century or two when they were ahead of the world by about that much.
I think this strategy might have worked 5 years ago before OS X and Linux - particularly now that Linux has hit critical mass on the server. It's probably too late now to try and get users to walk from Linux just for a few killer features in Longhorn.
Does it hurt to hear them lying? Was this the only world you had?
There should be defensive patents, patents issued saying "we figured out how to do this on our own, we don't want to stop other people form figuring out the same thing we just don't want to be prevented from using our inventions."
Actually, there are. They're called Statutory Invention Registration these days. For a very small fee you can just register that you invented something, without actually obtaining patent protection for it. But, the patent office will have that you invented it on file.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
I support friends and family computers. Most use XP, while a few are ME and finally some stalwarts still on 98 (hey, it works fine for their needs)
I do my best to recommend OS upgrades ONLY when they're necessary, and honestly, most times they are not needed.
When Windows 2000 came out, several of my friends/family wanted to switch to it, and I told them that if they switched, I could no longer support them. I don't have the time/engery to hassle with a "new" os, with "new" innovations. (I help them with XP, because I use it at times, and am at least familiar with it, and it comes on all new boxes... I have yet to sit in front of a Win2k box)
This tactic worked. you'll see in the list, above, that there are no friends or family running 2k.
I'll simply say the same thing when "longhorn" comes around (love the "mess with the bull" garbage). "I'm sorry, but if you choose to upgrade/install "longhorn", I cannot help you.
Since I get at least 2-3 calls for help a month, I know that my services are needed. Since I'm not charging money to help them, the least they can do is *help me* to help them.
It's been a common thread for MS to build large platforms based upon common ideas and then encourage some higher authority to bequeath all ownership to them. It may be anticompetitive but it's the way to make money. It's easy enough for the lawyers to haggle over the legal details.
I see it like this: a bunch of brainiacs get together and come up with the YTTR standard for the good of the computing world. MS throws a thousand programmers at writing applications which expand on the YTTR standard and add new features. The MS effort also, if it can, usurps control of the YTTR standard from the brainiacs who simply can't afford the time and money to keep up in the race. MS then patents the applications based on the features and includes the YTTR standard by reference. Three years down the road, when someone else attempts to build a competing application based on the YTTR standard, MS can sue for infringement of IP.
Is that not at least part of how Netscape was harassed to death? Maybe the IP lawsuits themselves didn't kill NS but the added strain took away from productive development.
The entertainment industry did it with DeCSS. They own a patent on a particular form of encryption not on encryption itself. Using that patent as a basis they were able to harass others who were developing competing encryption algorithms.
I'm positive that if Fruehofer had a big enough legal team he would've attempted similar maneuvers against competing mp3 encoders (hasn't he already?) and possibly Ogg/Vorbis.
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
Slashdot | Microsoft Assembles Patent Arse...
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Hey, this is Slashdot, and we're talking about Microsoft! It should be very easy to tell a priori what the actual reasons are.
Signatures are for stupids.
Wasn't this strategy was first embodied in Lotus's early attempts to patent the "look and feel" of its software?
(A clever abuse of the patent system. Wonder if one could patent it.)
Seeing bad movies only encourages them. Watch responsibly
which they did develop, not FAT in general.
I disagree. In addition to all the anti-trust issues pointed out by others here, if we ever needed ammo to convince users that single-vendor lockin was bad, HERE IT IS.
No company can do anything without income, and I think Longhorn will drive users away in droves toward simpler and more robust alternatives. There's no way the market is going to select Microsoft's plan for the future because it will be appalled at what Longhorn WON'T let them do. (heh, heh).
I know I'm not going to upgrade -- I've purchased my last copy of Windows because the price of future versions will be too high, even if they give it away.
BTW, Why is Microsoft's solution to design problems "more code" instead of "less complexity"? They must have skipped that day in design school.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Publication has most of the properties the grandparent wanted: turnaround time is typically 6 months to a year (depending on whether you go conference or journal), costs are minimal (usually a few hundred dollars for a conference, less for journal), and it gets disseminated to a wide audience.
The downside is that the bar for patents appears lower than for publication; it seems like I'm always reading on Slashdot about patents that are successfully granted for ideas that do nothing to advance the state of the art, which leads me to suspect that there may be a "gray area" of ideas that are patentable (at least under our current system) but would have difficulty being accepted for publication. This is probably where "defensive patenting" would be useful.
"The idea isn't to ensure that Microsoft makes a fair profit from its patents; it's to make sure that no one else can write fully compatible software."
Given the Eolas debacle, I'd say your statement is a case of ignoring the facts and believing what you want to believe. I don't know MS's business plan, but I can just as easily argue that MS is patenting everything under the sun to avoid getting sued for infringement of other people's frivolous patents.
Vote for Pedro
I don't understand at all how the OpenSource movement can complain about a company applying for a patent on its filesystem. So what if its proprietry, a company can choose to apply for a patent in what it wants.
This is really where the movement looses out to companies. I honestly can't understand the obsession with what is essentially copying stuff from other companies. There is already plenty of scope for interoperability in systems through Service Orientation. In the worst case scenario, one could "share" the contents of their disk through a "service". Software will still needs to access systems, this just seems terribly overblown.
As long as Users can keep sharing there office documents the goal of linux on the desktop is still obtainable. The "movement" shouldn't sidetrack its efforts.
The real miguel is http://slashdot.org/~miguel/
Celebrate the finer things in life
There should be defensive patents, patents issued saying "we figured out how to do this on our own, we don't want to stop other people form figuring out the same thing we just don't want to be prevented from using our inventions."
These already exist. They're called publications. Once you've published something, nobody else can patent it (and you can't either, once a one-year time limit expires).
The only case where someone else could patent a method which you are already using is if you've kept the method a secret -- which is exactly what the patent system is designed to stop.
While there can be no doubt that the actual implementation of the patent system is severely flawed, the overall purpose and approach -- using the granting of monopolies to encourage people to publish their research instead of keeping it as "trade secrets" -- is certainly reasonable.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Shuffling the technology deck in the middle of the game to ward of competitors does not seem to work in some cases -- just ask Intel.
HPC for Primates. Read Cluster Monkey
It shouldn't really be much of a surprise. This is how power works. Microsoft will get what they want, and the world will just suck it up and deal.
:)
Yes, it will be expensive. But it will also be affordable. If it is too expensive Microsoft won't make any money at all. So they will find the pricing structure that allows them to suck just as much money as possible from everybody, without driving the masses to relatively unworkable alternatives.
And people will purchase music online, watch DVD's, play computer games, and accomplish work for their employers....all on very tightly controlled computers.
Its not the end of the world. Its just the end of the freedom that computers used to represent. Your computer won't do everything you would like it to do anymore, but it will do enough to keep you upgrading it.
I will resist it tooth and nail, of course, as will other geeks. But the masses won't even see it comming, and they will ruin everything for us. It sucks, but its life, and there isn't much we can do about it.
IANAL, but I frequently encounter statements like:
Acceptance of this is hereby granted contingent upon strict accordance to all rules, regulations and provisions required by all Private, Local, State and Federal agencies, policies, and organizations having jurisdiction...quidquid latinum dictum est, altum viditur...
In plain english: "It's okay by us as long as it's okay with everyone else."
There. Your "other regulations" conundrum is solved!
=Smidge=
Unfortunately that's not how defensive patents work. It's more like: "You want to stop us doing business with your stoopid patent? Fine, we'll wipe your face across the floor using our stoopid patents!"
Patents can only be defensive in the same sense that nukes are defensive: as a threat for retaliation.
If all you're looking for is a recognition of your prior art, just publish in a well read journal, as other posters have pointed out.
This is basically the exact same pattern Microsoft followed in the early 90's in regards to the internet but in a slightly different guise. The goal is to box the people who use their OS in to using Microsoft and only Microsoft. We all recall how well it worked then and it is likely to work about as well this time.
By 2007 Microsoft will be porting all their applications to run under Linux and will be back to trying their "embrace, extend, attempt to strangle" stratagy.
Too bad our government is so spineless. Microsoft keeps doing the same things over and over again and will continue to do so as long the penalty continues to be as miniscule as it has been up until now.
I really think this is great, if Microsoft will patent all the flaws and then fight in court to prevent anyone making the same mistakes :-) Did they patent their nine-time-reboot technology yet?
Cheers, Erik
I think that Microsoft is tacitly acknowledging that they can't keep up with the F/OSS communities any more. Even without being hit by Sasser at work, I'm hard pushed to think of anything that XP does better than the SUSE 9.0 distro I use at home, except interoperating with closed Microsoft products. The only advantage Windows has is in things that are opaque to F/OSS developers, so effectively making some key elements of Longhorn opaque is the only way they can hope to compete in the future.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
The hardest, most expensive part of development is the creation of the overall formula / mix of technologies that will make a successful product. Tremendous energies are spent debating the rights and wrongs of various approaches on technical, strategic technical (long term evolutionary goals), business and business technical grounds. The energies are spent both in informal and formal ways. Microsoft spends many millions just getting 100s of people to come in and use different interfaces so that they can determine scientifically which approaches are best for which populations. That is their investment and the overall look and feel and selection of technologies to employ is the result. And, they probably make that investment 20 times over before they actually have one product that really hits the right formula. Coding is the easy part.
Then people come along and copy the formula, many times under more relaxed less demanding conditions and implement something better (though years later), top it off with openly speaking of stealing the show, and actually have the GAUL to CRITICIZE when the company realizes that maybe they need to start patenting the results of their investments?
Anybody can code. Anybody can code even better when they don't have to make money on it. But few can architect. Architects are only about 1% of our population and architects with business sense and a true sense of the average joe non-geek user are far fewer. Regrettably, we, as a society in general, do not give them their due. We look at what they did and just dismiss it with "that's obvious" or "anyone could do that" or "its all been done before", all of which may be true, but if it hasn't been put together in that combination and the combination does show greater value, then they did it first, they deserve their due, others shouldn't copy it without paying their respects and dues and that's that.
Most people spend their whole life and don't come up with a single marketable idea. Some companies spend billions and only come up with a few. I admire both the people that succeed and the companies that succeed and only hope to get my turn just once.
And yes I'm a hypocrite who has made copies of all of their CDs and multiple family members listen to those copies in different places at the same time. But that's different isn't it? :o)
>Bush and others like him won't be in the >Whitehouse for ever.
What are you smoking?
Any politician who deviates even an iota from the republicats would have been labelled a goofball, well before he ever got to power.
Seriously, youre as bad as the Bush-haters who claim that Kerry is 'different'. Hell, 'liberals' like that fat buffon Michael Moore tried to convince us that a pompous egomaniacal general was a man of peace because he 'told him so'.
The problem isnt the Bushes of hte world, its you and the Moores who are so blinded by one side that you dont notice the other is just as bad.
People who are only programmed to think in sound bytes that they cant use this new invention called the internet to check back a few months to find out the positions of the 'gentler' options.
Its like asking if you want to be raped by jack the Ripper or fingered by Captain Hook.
Desite being a linux loving zeleot myself, I have to say I do not know of any instance where microsoft has really used any of its patents in a way which I think is really bad. The closest we can get is the FAT one, but I actually don't think they have even enforced that anywhere.
Of course I may be proved wrong over time, but I just think they are doing what all other major US companies are doing.
If this article is true and indeed there is a M$ plot to prevent potential competitors from being compatible, at what point do we as consumers and corporations decide to not worry about backwards compatibilty and move on to a new and improved standard?
;-)
Lets take M$ Word for example. At some point Open Office, Star Office, or some other as yet unamed office suite could have the same if not more functionality than Word, be more user friendly and yet be totally incompatible with Word.
Is there a standard for word processing documents or spreadsheets? If not,should there be? Probably.
I know that there may be oodles and oodles of Word and Excel docs out there and it would be nice if all applications played nice together. But if thats not going to happen then maybe its just time to move on to something else.
Of course you'll have to have a migration strategy in place.
Just my two cents.
Don't believe me? Think Pocket PC, where virtually any PPC is the same as any other. The next logical step in all this is Xbox, where Microsoft sells the hardware and everyone else is a supplier to Microsoft. Indeed, Xbox is a learning platform for how to marry the OS with the hardware such that one won't work without the other.
When you tie the OS so tightly to the hardware the anti-trust issue goes away. Of course only Xbox plays Xbox games -- and only PS2 plays PS2 games. So what? Of course only Longhorn PCs run Longhorn applications -- and only Macintoshes run Macintosh apps. So what?
Oh, sure, someone will get Linux to run on Longhorn PCs, but it will be just like trying to get Linux running on an Xbox. It can be done, but it's klugy and possible illegal and really not worth the hassle.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Simply patent the act of filing a patent.
Microsoft are allowed to file patents on their technology just like anyone else. Patents are a Good Thing -- they share knowledge in detail with anyone who wants to read them, but people cannot use that information to create a product for monetary gain. The patents Microsoft have filed seem legitimate. Why does the open source community hate patents so much? I think that if the open source community came up with something new, they would hopefully patent it just like Microsoft are doing. If they didn't patent it, then they're fools because someone else will. Just because you have a huge open source cabal doesn't mean you can decide that "patents are a bad thing, we're not going to play that game". The world doesn't work like that: you can't boycott the patents system by Not Filing A Patent. Patents inspire competition and are one of the primary reasons that America is where it is today. I am not an American, nor am I a lawyer.
They received 3415 patents in 2003. If MS manages to keep up the "10 patent per day" rate, then of course, IBM will have to turn over the crown. But IBM is an Open Source darling, right?
Is this sig nificant?
I foresee a lot of folks annoyed with the restrictions more than they are joyed by the content.
I'd agree with you except that the general population doesn't concern itself with the technology side of media. If set top boxes replace DVD or VCR's, people will buy it figuring that's the future. Most unfortunately won't care as long as they get the movies/music they want to watch.
The tech folks though are going to have lots of problems with this as it limits their choice of hardware/software. I wish more people would take an interest in "how" things work rather than just being users.
> Well at the moment they are about to bend SCO over a court bench
/. and a pretty disgusting move.
Using a LWZ ("GIF") patent, which IBM has ignored up to this point. A fact underreported on
The problem with that strategy is that it is vulnerable to patent holders who don't make anything. When you don't have any products, it's quite hard to infringe on someone else's patents...
Eolas is a reasonable example (however much I wouldn't have minded seeing them selectively enforce their patent against Microsoft), and SCO is similar (save that it still has a product--ideally, it should have NO products which could be infringing), but the point is that these parasites -- "IP Vampires" as I prefer to call them -- are a dominant strategy; that is, they dominate the cross-licensing strategy.
Since you don't have anything to go after, your only choice is to settle for the nuisance value of the suit, but the thing is that if one can come up with enough of these, they can bleed a company dry. Sure, we haven't seen many yet, but given how powerful the approach is, we may start to see a "goldrush" of patent holdings companies doing nothing but litigation.
Now, if one company sets up another to attack their rivals, of course the other company could always "return fire" with their own proxy company. However, there is nothing inherent to require that any of the parties actually innovating (or at least producing some kind of product) have to be involved with these parasite companies.
Left unchecked, in the long term, such companies only harm any actual progress. I can only hope that they do not remain unchecked for much longer.
IANAL. Apart from making money off of patents, and apart from patenting everything so that non-ms software will be incompatible, do you think that another reason would be to patent things before someone else DOES? A sort of preventative measure?
If IBM had its way, your PC would be a glorified 3270 emulator connecting to some AS/400
You seem unaware that IBM went out of its way to make the original ISA architecture royalty free. The PC revolution happened because anyone could make a compatible hardware system. After enough other players made their fortunes they got together to make standards such as PCI and AGP without some individual company mandating it. But the ball started rolling with IBM's freely giving away the specs and rights to make compatible ISA.
You may ask how in the hell they managed this one, but it seems they have devised a novel way to herd Worms. They just set boxes of Windows out in the fields, and the worms just keep rollin in. AMAZING. Wormherders everywhere are jumping for joy.
Even master wormhered Paul Maud'dib had to give them credit.
Another view is that big companies patent lots of things, and then by the implicit threat of suing the "small guy", prevent innovation from moving forward. In practice this is harder than it sounds, since the damage to the image of the company can be considerable if it tried to sue a small target - that's why you rarely see it happen.
In the mind of everyone who would learn about and understand such an action, Microsoft's image has already been damaged. For most of their customers, however, such an attack by Microsoft would slip under the radar... which is probably why Microsoft apparantly has no moral objections to making such threats against small targets and why people like this blogger can talk about that situation as if it were a hypothetical "view" rather than a recent occurance.
Don't you actually have to invent something new to get a patent? Because there sure as hell isn't anything in Longhorn that's the least bit new!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Microsoft, you see, is electing to make WinFS not just a mere file system but a complex database engine application that will manage relational and XML data as well as file data.
Microsoft says this aims to give users a way to search for information content independent of format. I say that's a job for search engines, and Google's doing just fine, thank you very much.
So this guy wants people to use Google to search for stuff on their hard drive?
This is an example of anti-MS zealotry in action:
Phase 1: denounce any radical ideas Microsoft plans on implementing as stupid, better done by (X), pointless, etc.
Phase 2: after a couple years of this "pointless" MS tech being used, find out that it's actually not that bad and perhaps even better than a competing "kosher" technology (see SAMBA vs NFS), and start making a Linux implementation.
Phase 3: bash Microsoft for not innovating.
I don't see any real need to deconstruct something as basic as a file system and replace it with such a complex infrastructure except to make it harder for anyone else--say, the open-source community--to make WinFS-compatible programs and servers.
Maybe, just maybe MS is trying something different for a change. Of course it's going to require big changes to the filesystem. I have a feeling that their interests lie in making a better FS first and an incompatible one second, not the other way around, as many would speculate. The author seems very intent on being able to access Windows disks over the network -- Longhorn won't really change that. If SAMBA doesn't work with Longhorn, there's always FTP. Somehow I don't think it's going to be as dire as the author makes it out to be.
I'm ignorant; why does publication have to be through a journal or a conference?
And why is there a "bar" for publication? Why is there not a dedicated journal, printed on cheap paper in black and white to keep costs easily covered by low fees?
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
Well... Wait until RedHat runs out of money or some jackass gets the helm. No one thought Caldera would do what it is doing now four years ago. Hindsight is always 20/20. :(
If you have a patent on some feature, say browser plugins, that prevents a ip warehouse from patenting it slightly before you release it. That is the nature of Defensive patents. You are thinking of offensive patents.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Let's get a few things straight.
First, Microsoft isn't trying to compete with Linux. If they were, Linux would need a similar desktop market share. Linux isn't even close. That's why you bitch about Microsoft having a monopoly. If they were roughly equal in market share, you would call it an oligopoly or a cartel, depending on their level of cooperation.
Second, Microsoft wouldn't be stupid enough to purposely break compatibility with everything. Obviously, the author of the article is merely trying to spread FUD. Longhorn is going to be delayed while they add new features, reduce loopholes, and make sure their software is as user-friendly(read: built for those who don't know what they're doing) as possible.
Third, they've had trouble with patents recently. People are suing them for trivial shit that would appear to be common sense or common use. Therefore, they want to cover their asses by patenting anything they consider necessary, useful, or at the very least something someone like SCO would consider suing them over.
All that said, this article was written to do two things: whip Linux users into a frenzy, and show non-Linux users that Linux users don't think like the rest of the world. The article is so slanted, that it makes Linux users look like paranoid fools. All the author does is throw a few wild conspiracy theories out there, and hope that someone will publish him because of his love for an operating system.
I think one of the reasons people hate lawyers is that they often say things in a complicated way when a simpler way would have sufficed.
The good news is that at least some law schools are taking note and teaching law students how to write like NORMAL PEOPLE
Ah, but once Microsoft gets hit with an antitrust suit, a key issue will be opening the API. Which means that the Linux kernel will be able to support the DRM system.
You'll still need a key for the hardware to accept the kernel as a trusted piece of software, but that can be accomplished by a third party providing a compiled binary optimized for your system, along with a key and the source code.
From that point on, it's the user's responsibility to keep that key safe, and not allow anyone else to have access to it! Media will likely be encrypted and watermarked using your key, and you'll get accused of copyright violation if a copy of that watermark is found outside of your computer.
The compiled binary+key+source concept would also have to apply to playback software.
You need a compiled binary because software will need to be somehow certified safe. And the only way to do that is to have a "trusted" (by the copyright holders, that is) entity perform the auditing and compilation of the software.
It does raise barriers to software development, though, the tearing down of which is part of what free software has been all about. So it's not an ideal solution, but it's workable.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
These already exist. They're called publications. Once you've published something, nobody else can patent it (and you can't either, once a one-year time limit expires).
Dream on. It might work in some alternative universe, but in this one it only applies if you have the $$$ to contest the issue in court. Against a Microsoft, IBM, or IP litigation factory, you don't have a chance even if you are totally in the right.
I read the internet for the articles.
The market is ultimately the bar on patent utility. If you have ever filed for and recieved a patent you would not make such a statement. Many articles admitted for publication are little more than fodder.
Except that if you patent something, you are preventing any third party from copying your invention, patenting it themselves, and then sueing you for infringing the patent.
Of course, you then have prior art with which to defend yourself, but it's going to be more expensive and less certain than patenting the product/procedure/function/word/bl**dy obvious thing in the first place.
"Don't believe me? Think Pocket PC, where virtually any PPC is the same as any other."
Its funny. MS lovers have always said that its hard for MS to design thier OSs to work flawlessly because of all the hardware they have to support. They control the PocketPC hardware spec and their OSs are still shit!
Simple then.
Register the copyright either to some code or to a document describing your idea. Then a fixed and tangible represntation of your idea will be on file down at the copyright office. For a fee you can get a certified copy of your work back.
Alternatively, you could write your idea down and have the document notarized.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I don't understand why there's no law regarding the fair licensing of patents. It would seem that a fair solution would and should be a law which says that you're allowed to leverage a patent for non-commercial use. Any commercial sale of a product that leverages a patent cannot impose fees in excess of of N% of the revenue generated by that product, where N could be determined by any number of factors and judged by a panel of interested parties.
It is NOT workable. Why I the admin/developer/end-user should need some third party to say what software I can and cannot run? Why I should need some entity to tell me that I have to pay them to sign my own code so I would be allowed to run it? Why shouldn't I be able to design my own media player, or to take a FPGA and a couple DACs and making my own sound card? What is the purpose of the computers - being a tool for the people, or making sure some rich suit'n'tie bastards can become even more rich without having to do any real work?
If this system takes off, it becomes just another disincentive for being legal and law-obedient citizen.
..is simple - STOP using microsoft dependent software if you fear being locked in. End your dependency. It'll be like quitting smoking - difficult at first, most rewarding in the end.
----- One learns to itch where one can scratch.
Why isn't microsoft jumping on the DMCA wagon, and making it illegal to reverse engineer their protocol?
Why are there only 19 people folding@home for slashdot?
Maybe they are just busy patenting all the worms :)
What does this get you? A copyright doesn't protect an "idea," it only protects an expression of an idea. And you can't protect an idea with a patent either. The original poster was right -- just publish the material into the public domain if you want to keep others from patenting the work.
However, remember that in the U.S. you can file for a patent as long as the material hasn't been publically known for a year, so there is still some danger involved. In the rest of the world, however, publication before submitting an application for a patent absolutely bars a patent being issueds.
"That's not even wrong..." -- Wolfgang Pauli
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Let's see: Microsoft dictates the price of the OS; Microsoft dictates the price of the BIOS; Microsoft dictates the design of the rest of the hardware. Doesn't leave much room for innovation or cost-cutting, does it?
Replace Microsoft with Apple.
This has been Apple's business model for years yet few complain. Apple does innovate (I love my iPod). The only problem I have with Apple is the tight relationship between hardware and software. Yes I know this allows the computer to be much more stable.
I think Apple could make some serious cash if they created an x86 based OS. Their computer sales would take a hit.
Ok, I will stop ranting now. I just (hits self in head) clicks submit Feels better
Microsoft is not innovative company as far as Computer _Science_ is concerned. This is more or less true statement. However, they shine in other aspects. It is too be predicted because they're in a unique position in the history and have to come up with ideas to maintain this position.
Here's a list from the top of my head:
- Triple E: Embrace-Extend-Exterminate
- Psychological take-over: MS annouces it will
start competing in market X. Customers in market
X stop updating their software waiting for MS
to release their thing. Market X vendors
stock goes down, MS acquires one of them only
to lay off everybody and butcher the software.
- Including court system in business process:
it's OK to be fined for being a monopoly as long
as Wall Street expectations are met.
Any others?I keep reading "anti-trust" this and that here, and of course it's all true. But I think it's very clear from the US Government's actions (lack thereof), that they have NO INTEREST is pursuing Microsoft in any way, shape, or form. The EU might have a chance, but then Microsoft can roll them up in a huge ball of procedural delay until it's simply a moot point. I think the only choice left is to simply ignore what Microsoft is doing (assume it's doing bad things) and concentrate on building a Linux platform (yes, an idiot proof application install standard, do something about dependency hell, and of course the "desktop") that corporate buyers actually want to deploy.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Actually at $0.25/device they're likely making really good money for it. They just sit back, and people send them money, they don't have to do any work.
You don't need to license a patent to write a good implementation of a filesystem, only to distribute it.
Of course, software patents have no legal validity in most of the world, what may happen is that development of competing products will simply be done elsewhere, and they will be sold by download over the net, with very little chance of the Convicted Monopolist being able to prevent it, short of imposing censorship on the US part of the internet.
I hope that when the psychotic moron currently posing as president is kicked out, things will change and the law concerning monopolies and patents will be properly enforced in the US. Most of the software patents which are granted are illegal due to prior art, the patent examiners are so overloaded and under-funded that they slip through the net. But, bully-boys like the scumbags in Redmond have the money to bankrupt any challenger by delaying tactics to the point where the legal fees escalate. The patent problem must be dealt with at source, not by allowing a Convicted Monopolist to ride roughshod over everyone else.
Please be patient with me, as IANAL.
What if Joe Gnu invents something, say, a new network protocol. He publishes and patents it, but then immediately turns around and intentionally releases it into the public domain. A few years later, M$ or IBM or someone comes along and tried to appropriate the new protocol in a proprietary fashion. On whom is the onus of protecting the original patent? In other words, does Joe Gnu have to defend it, or does the the government step in?
That's my impression, also. Microsoft managers learned IBM's abusiveness. But then they pioneered their own; Microsoft is a company known for its innovation.
Yes, and they learned the lessons from ISA (ie smaller competitors will kick IBM's rear) and came back to conquer the desktop with proprietary MicroChannel. Rember the PS/2?
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
What does it have to do with all of this ? - Well... if MS does what everyone else here is predicting, then the younger generation will find ways around it or replace it (and move to Linux or Mac, etc). They will convey this information to others and it will slowly spread.
In my view, the best you can do is to teach others about alternatives. I use Linux solely at home, except for my wife's Win 98 machine. She has clearly stated that she has no reason to upgrade to the latest and greatest, since all she does is read emails, browse the web and write Word documents. She has also specifically stated that rather than upgrade she'd switch to Linux, since the later versions of Windows appear too complex to her and she has no desire to spend that kind of money. It was simply a matter of education, and it's only a matter of time before my whole household is on Linux.
Then you better join a campaign outlawing hardware-level integration of DRM. Because that's the only way I can think of to stop it.
IIRC, TCPA doesn't have to be enabled. That means you can still use newer hardware, just without the abilities granted by "trusted computing."
I'm not really a consumer of streaming multimedia, so I don't see a problem for me.
That doesn't mean I don't fight it...I've written my congressmen several times, even if I only get boilerplate letters back saying "blah blah blah we don't have the authority to pass laws regarding blah, so blah..."
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
I'd like to have time machine so i can check what happens in next 10 years.
Will Bill The Great Emperor rule or will we live in wonderland of free software?
> BTW, Why is Microsoft's solution to design
> problems "more code" instead of "less
> complexity"? They must have skipped that day in
> design school.
Exactly. They hire 24-year-olds with no fraggin' clue about system design or how people use computers in the Real World - then make then Product Managers. As Hannibal said, "Second-raters, the lot."
You know why Microsoft must eventually fail? Because they're morons. And the chief moron is Bill Gates. Oh, sure, he taught himself contract law - whoop-de-doo.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
> Microsoft could take away our ability to exercise freedom of speach and press by controlling the only medium available with a still-low-enough barrier to entry.
3 words, 2 phases:
China, Russia, OSS, hordes of programmers, laughing at US patents.
Or to put it another way, when enough people violate a patent and post it free for download...
Really I can't see how any of the doomsday scenarios posted here can come about without an unprecedented national policy of isolationism that includes a pretty totalitarian U.S. National Firewall. Dell and MS are going to have us ALL arrested? I don't think so.
"Do you think it could happen here?"
In this context the whole interweb thingy changes everything about the word "here". For our purposes today "here" is Earth. No I don't think it could happen here. As long as we keep hacking xbox's, building community WLANs, cheering on our Skylarov's, and writing OSS, we'll keep ahead of the Corporate Nobility.
Worse comes to worst, there will be a black market here for foreign non-DRM hardware and a string of International WLANS along the borders pumping free software inwards. They don't have a Department of Corporateland Security everywhere.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
MS patents arsenal makes a world a better place as others wont be able to repeat those blunders.. There isn't anything better than patents for wrongdoings.
The problem is that anti-competitive practices are just that, they have to be practiced. Right now they can plot, plan, and develop to their hearts content, since they are not practicing anything.
Even after the rollout it will be years before any complaints hits the courts, by then MS will have made billions and be ready with the next anti-competive plan for the marketplace. The court cost and fines will be microscopic in comparison to the profits that have already been booked.
Just remember how long the AT&T and Standard Oil monopolies were allow to live before the US courts stepped in to actually break them up.
--laz
"Just remember, it takes a village idiot." -- The Motley Fool.
You seem unaware that IBM went out of its way to make the original ISA architecture royalty free
A) It was not royalty free. Cheap maybe, but not free.
B) They were under Court Order to do so as part of their Anti-trust problems. Not because they were nice guys.
Maybe he is content with a seriously-ageing user interface, a file-system that hasn't really changed in decades, and a computer that behaves just like it does today, but a bit faster and a bit more stable.
I don't. I want:
And as for his decision that the Longhorn OS APIs will be closed, and communications proprietry - he obviously has no knowledge of these things. Everyone knows
What a looser.
I really hate to crush such optimism, but patents are intended to be anti-competitive by their very nature (for a limited time).
Plus, looking at the results of the previous anti-trust trial (at least in the US), I'm not so optimistic.
Actually, I think the acronym stands for digital restrictions management.
funny munging
Why not just pay $30 to register your invention in copyright format at the library of congress copyright office. In effect, it's published in a government agency.
http://www.copyright.gov/docs/fees.html
The patent application cost at least $400.
I think what the previous poster meant was that nothing stops someone getting a patent and not intending to do anything with it. So, getting a patent can be more about blocking progress for others, instead of enhancing progress for yourself. Maybe if you re-state it as patents don't enforce an obligation on the holder to produce anything, would it make more sense?
The difference is that one is focused on making everyone else fail, rather than making yourself more successful. Too many companies act as if success is only possible when all their competitors have failed.
Exigo spamos et dona ferentes
Get a grip Slashdot sheep - the article on eWeek is an OPINION piece! Don't reply to this as if the article were full of facts - it isnt'.
Your mind looks a little cramped. Why don't you stretch it a little?
I wish more people would take an interest in "how" things work rather than just being users.
Darn right. Unfortunately, most don't care. They just want to get things done. The "computer as toaster" model.
You are right... they should be worried.
Remember, in ten years... hardware will be free.
Just ask MicroSoft.
--Phillip
Can you say BIRTH TAX
Wow - you're a moron.
Do you wish to be pot, or kettle?
Microsoft's dominance in the marketplace is slipping. The last few years has seen a steady erosion of the gains they made in the server market, and the desktop is no longer looking as secure as it once did. The emerging markets are fucking *huge*, and it looks like Microsoft will not control them: the embedded market, and rapidly developing countries like India and China, which hold a large segment of the world's population.
The desktop is quickly becoming commodity; until AI truly develops, there is very little "innovation" (an overused, useless word these days) at all. Until we have self-managing data and natural-language spoken-word interfaces into the computer, there's very little new stuff out there.
As long as Linux is free to expand into the stagnant desktop or into the frontiers of embedded devices and emerging markets, Linux will-- at the moment, there is very little real difference between them. For every strength MS-Windows possesses, it has an equal weakness (expense, poor security, bad design, etc). Same with Linux. As long as this is true, there is very little reason Linux won't seriously erode Microsoft's desktop market.
Indeed, this is happening today. Last year companies used Linux as a threat to get reduced acquisition costs from Microsoft; this year, malware is so rampant that many companies are actually switching. I believe this trend will continue over the next few years as long as Microsoft doesn't understand this basic tenet-- security is more important than bells and whistles.
But that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
"remember that in the U.S. you can file for a patent as long as the material hasn't been publically known for a year, so there is still some danger involved"
I beleive you've misinterpreted this. If you publish details of something today, you'd have a year to file for a patent on it. If I publish details of something today, you'd have to have filed yesterday.
The publically know for a year is to prevent an inventor from waiting until everyone adopts, then patenting. Prior art has no delay.
Interesting...so what's the plan for that other bastion of patents-out-the-wazoo, IBM? You know, the Linux hero in corporate clothing?
Hopefully, now that they've realized the game is much more fun when all can play, IBM will make sure their portfolio stays ahead that Microsoft will have to cross license everything to legally sell their system. At least until the rest of the world realizes how much power not implementing software patents will give them over the US.
Don't think they will? It doesn't take a genuis to figure out that if everyone but Americans could freely use American ideas America's IP based economy would be royally screwed.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
we don't need a new type of patent for that -- just publish your work. if someone tries to hit you with a patent suit, down the road, you can point out your published material, as "Prior Art".
Instead of spouting FUD (as so many accuse Microsoft of doing), why don't we see what someone from Microsoft has to say?
Chris Pratley gives us a small bit of insight:
"One of the methods for protecting intellectual property is the patent system. Now, everybody hates the patent system. After all, it is pretty broken. The original idea of patents (I gather) was to promote the spread of ideas and inventions. With no protection for ideas, inventors resorted to secrecy. e.g. the exact method by which a chemical was made was kept secret and locked up in a factory vault, so that society could not benefit from the idea except to the extent that the inventor used it himself. The patent system offered what seemed a reasonable proposition. In return for explaining the idea in great detail so that others could understand and use it, the inventor was protected for a period of years where they had exclusive rights to use the idea, or to license it to others. If someone stole the idea, the inventor had legal recourse.
Well, fast forward to "now", and the patent system is used almost entirely differently. At Microsoft, we used to pay little attention to patents - we would just make new things, and that would be it. Then we started getting worried - other big competitors (much bigger than we were at the time) had been patenting their inventions for some years, and it made us vulnerable. One of these big companies could dig through their patent portfolio, find something close to what we had done, then sue us, and we would have to go through an elaborate defense and possibly lose. So Microsoft did what most big companies do, which is start to build what is called a "defensive" patent portfolio. So if a big company tried to sue us, we could find something in our portfolio they were afoul of, and counter-sue. In the cold war days, this strategy was called "mutual assured destruction", and since it was intolerable for all parties to engage, it resulted in a state called "détente", or "standoff". This is what you see today for the most part in lots of industries.
There are lots of other problems with the patent system. For example, Microsoft gets "submarined" quite often. A small company or individual has an idea, which they patent as quietly as possible. Then they sit back and wait (years if necessary), until some big company develops something (independently of course) that is sufficiently similar to their idea that they can surface and sue us. I have been involved in a couple of these, so I can speak from experience. The people involved often never had any intent of developing their idea, and they also make sure to wait until we have been shipping a product for several years before informing us they think they have a patent on something related, so that "damages" can be assessed as high as possible. This simply makes innovating the equivalent of walking into a minefield. This doesn't seem to be helping the process of moving humanity forward.
Another view is that big companies patent lots of things, and then by the implicit threat of suing the "small guy", prevent innovation from moving forward. In practice this is harder than it sounds, since the damage to the image of the company can be considerable if it tried to sue a small target - that's why you rarely see it happen. I think this works both ways of course as I described in the last paragraph. Basically whoever has the patent has the power.
Another complete perversion of the original patent system is that because there are triple damages if the plaintiff can show the infringer knowingly infringed on a patent, there is a huge disincentive to look at the patents on file at the patent office. If you do a "patent search" to see if what you want to do is patented already, and you find nothing, you are still liable for triple damages if someone sues you and can show that you looked at their patent. This matters because even if you think their idea is irrelevant, a court may not agree with you. So the only safe thing to do is not loo
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
IANAL but how does publication of any type have anything to do with patentability? If I am trying to patent an idea and you've published the same thing prior to me sure, but if I've published before the application all it does is re-inforce my date of conception claims.
And while publication in a peer reviewed journal is more prestigious, I think that publishing a PDF to a floppy and having a NY Times legal-notes publication of the md5Sum of the PDF or mailing the printed article to self in a sealed envelope with a postmark would be just as good in court.
The whole point of a patent is that you can publicly disclosed the idea, without lose legaly protection. It would seem to me that having a third party publication of your idea would be a benifit if the idea was dismissed by the USPTO only to later approve the same thing from somebody else, at least you'd have art priori protection for your own idea and a chance at having the patent transfered to you in court.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Very interesting and engaging site, regarding the coming oil shortages. Makes me wanna take up survivalism, so that when the End comes, my clan and I are subsistence-farming, with no economic dependence on the outside world.
:-)
However, some of the links describe militant Islam as an invention to distract us from the real problem of oil peaking. I don't think that's true. Militant Islam is a very real problem, and it exists all around the globe - in Kosovo, Uzbekistan, Indonesia, India, Sudan... many places that have nothing to do with oil (or even Israel, for that matter). I could entertain the notion that a growing "globalism vs. tribalism" trend is to blame, but this doesn't involve our need for oil. Yet.
I predict that nanotech will provide low-energy (micro-energy, really, both to produce and to operate) devices that will form the basis for a post-oil economy. I also predict nanotech will be the source of unspeakable weapons and disasters in the coming decades. It's always something
dinner: it's what's for beer
You're right. I didn't explain things so well, now, did I? Oh well, at least I got the Euro patent stuff right...
"That's not even wrong..." -- Wolfgang Pauli
That reminds me of an old spoof of "The One-Minute Manager" entitled "The One-Bullet Manager" by Chairman Mao.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Its about controlling everything that is digital on the planet.
Compatibility is just a side issue along the path to total domination.
I'm still waiting for the government to pull a fast one on us, and mandate only 'approved' software can be used due to 'security issues'. Then require rather large budgets ( and proper DRM components ) to get on the approved list..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"Then we started getting worried - other big competitors (much bigger than we were at the time) had been patenting their inventions for some years, and it made us vulnerable. One of these big companies could dig through their patent portfolio, find something close to what we had done, then sue us, and we would have to go through an elaborate defense and possibly lose."
Good thing Microsoft has such an ethical business history so we can trust them to never do this...
Oh, wait.. nevermind.
Considering the above interpretations of the reason behind Microsoft's patent direction, Longhorn, DRM and BIOS lock-in, Sun's settlement doesn't sound as bad as all the "Sun caved in" pundits would have us believe. At least for Sun.
.Net/web platform APIs in the future, while MS tightens the noose in general and other software vendors get locked out.
If Sun has an agreement to be on the 'inside' and is guaranteed access to MS protocols, formats and APIs in the future they stand to profit nicely from Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior. Meanwhile, other server/UNIX vendors might be locked out.
Sun will be able to share files, directory services, access Exchange and all
Of course, this doens't help open-source, but Sun has never seemed very comfortable with OSS anyway.
The "Halloween" documents the partent is referring to are leaked memos from Microsoft that give an inside look at the way MS conducts itself when noone's watching. The whole series can be found here. If you've never read them, I highly recommend you spend a few minutes taking a look. Very insightful stuff. =]
Actually, publishing is only a defense if the others are slow to file. I believe that they have a year. Of course, it's illegal to lie when you claim that it's your own invention, and we know that nobody would do that. And it's dangerous, because they might prove you wrong (which,as said earlier, would be illegal).
To read the sarcasm in this correctly, one must remember that corporations can't be put in jail, and thier officers are largely immune to prosecution for the misdeeds of the corporation.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Aren't longhorns nearly extinct?
No, but microsoft doesn't really do this either. So I'm not sure what the distinction is.
I'd rather be lucky than good.
Summary of other posts: blah blah, microsoft sucks, kill them, slit their throats, spill their blood
...
But
The reality of the situation is that it's *your* patent system that allows them to do this. I don't think that Microsoft can be blamed for securing patents. They're just covering their butts, and they're doing it legally.
If you really have a problem with this kind of behaviour, elect politicians that share your same view. Otherwise, quit yer' bitchin'.
I don't know if that's what the original poster was after but I understand what you are saying.
I think the real key here is better patent examination. Patents are not supposed to be given for trivial things. Only useful inventions that show a real inventive spark are supposed to be awarded patents.
Typically, such an invention requires investment in time and money to create. Usually such an investment is a strong incentive to commercialize the results. That's how the system is supposed to work.
One place the patent system really falls apart (but not the only place) is in software patents. High research investment and high risk are not associated with many of the software patents that have been granted.
Other than games, what does Windows have that you can't you get from a combination of OSX and Linux today?
- Vaughan-Nichols
Well, he's partially right, if you paraphrase the quote properly.
I know what I want from an operating system, and I don't think I'm that different from most people. I want my operating system to ... work ... .
Hey! Now he's got the same opinion of Joe Everyuser! THEY WANT IT TO WORK!!! No average user wants to use APIs. No average user cares about DRM as long as the machine works. Please, stick to the facts: I'm Linux kicks ass for your average developer. But not to your average middle-age "maybe I should join the modern era" computer user.
And the registration fee is??
All I could find was that the price was set by the commissioner. I couldn't even determine that there was a set price. (For all I could tell, he might actually look over each one, and decide how much he wanted to charge to register it.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The only problem with your argument is that M$ has a long history of stealing other peoples ideas. How can they patent something based on stolen goods or is not theirs anyway?
Patenting a slightly different way of doing things is innovation, not invention. Patents were devised to protect NEW ideas, not 1 click shopping, or a variation of virtual desktops.
An architect does not patent his building. The tools used to design it are not patented. The concept of building from drawn plans and not a scale model is not patented. So, why should the tools and ideas behind software be locked away, but architects can use their tools and ideals freely?
If Rockefeller had patented the concept of a gasoline filling station would the governmet and general public have allowed it? What if Carnegie patented modern steel production? This what we are up against and of an equal or greater scale since the rest of the world would not have respected thoughs claims, but now the US is in a position to force the world to obey this stupidity.
Remember, all M$ products are based on STOLEN ideas,concepts, and code. They are not in a position to claim originality on any derivative products. (To borrow some SCO legal logic which M$ seems to agree with)
no
It terms of all the flaming for and against microsoft, one thing to keep mind thar part of the core of the ire directed against microsoft is due to fact that they use their monoplositic powers to such an extent that it is impossible for a niche commercial product to become financially viable. Which leaves us with the fragmented Open-source market trying desparately to meet the needs of people who would like to pay good money for a product that truly meets their needs. People who are willing to try three or four different products till they find the one they want.
I make my face look like this and concerned words come out.
I think they patent their shit to protect themselves from scumbags like Eolas threatening them with $500M lawsuits for all kinds of ridiculous things. I've never seen Microsoft actually ENFORCE any software patents. No, VFAT thing doesn't work. They merely sell reference implementation spec, and they didn't sue anyone so far.
- i kinda look on this as part of the natural evolution of the software industry, which seems to be moving along the same path of the electronics industry, in which there is much cross-licensing... - for example, neither Sony nor Kenwood, or Toshiba, et al, design, produce and market a new CD/AM/FM/clock without first transferring millions of dollars between themselves in order to avoid IP/patent lawsuits... it's getting harder and harder for an engineer to design a new CPU, let alone any electronic device without someone, somewhere popping out of the woodwork with a lawsuit UNLESS a cross-license fee has been paid... - lots of money changes hands between the large-scale industrialists on a regular basis... - unfortunately the proprietary software industry as a whole still has not woken up and recognized the opportunities of open source licensing and free software: 1. no money need change hands and everyone benefits from everyone's efforts 2. state of the art is advanced rather than choked off in wasted time and effort in the govt. and court systems... 3. better business relationships are created and maintained between companies and customers when companies collaborate and customers are the object of support...
Why do we need to follow MS lead on anything?
The open source community fully capable of setting standards for the internet and software.
The difference is that one is focused on making everyone else fail, rather than making yourself more successful.
I wanted to touch more on this. The problem we have is devising a system that encourages people to commercialize products but does not penalize people who are genuinely trying.
Many inventions are created that cannot be commercialized immediately. A patent needs to be applied for soon after the invention is reduced to practice. This needs to be done for practical reasons (lest the invention somehow get into the public domain) as well as statutory (if you don't actively pursue the invention and application you have effectively abandoned it and cannot get a patent).
So inventors get patents for inventions well before the invention has a practical commercial application.
Why can't the invention be commercialized? A small inventor may lack the immediate resources to produce and market the product. A large corporation may be involved in complicated products that require many pieces - and the current invention is but one of many. Sometimes the market conditions are not just quite right. The reasons can vary.
Just because an invention has not been commercialized doesn't mean an inventor is intentionally ignoring their patented invention.
Creating a patent system that allows for inventors to use their patent as they please means that inventors can also, effectively, ignore their patent. It's unfortunate. But I think the overall benefit of the patent system (that being, a huge amount of knowledge dedicated to the public) is more than compensation.
Fully agree except that (1) for now sw patents are still not allowed (nor valid) in the EU and (2) If someone from China wants to market in the US something that is patented there I doubt they can just do away with patents in the target market.
There is a point here somewhere... When somebody starts litigation for patent infringement, they are suing for damages. Therefore, they would be awarded a portion of the profits made from infringement. In the case of OSS, who would they sue?
End-users? Maybe possible, but only if they use the software to make profit and even then, hard, as SCO have proved.
Distributors? No, the GNU GPL(and others) make it clear that they are NOT selling the actual software, therefore not making a profit from it.
Developers? No, they have given it away, no profit there.
So who would they sue??? Anybody? Can anybody sue the OSS community successfully?
I think, though I'm not certain, that if the owner of a patent releases a piece of software that uses it under the GPL, then they are prohibited from suing for damages for any derivitive work.
OTOH, that hasn't stopped The SCO Group (the current name of the Canopy property formerly known as Caldera). But it does mean that they'll loose if they try to enforce it against anyone who can defend themselves.
OTOH, I'm not totally certain of my reading of the GPL. IANAL.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Remember, in ten years... hardware will be free.
Consider a headline I found from five years ago:
LATEST NEWS
June 16, 1999
Dell finally goes sub-$1,000
If you go to Dell's site today, their "outrageous deal" is a $499AR computer w/monitor. So it's certainly getting closer to free.
AR = after rebate
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
And you're forgeting the other salient point: you could get the prevalent operating system (DOS) from someone other than IBM. Since Microsoft's deal with Big Blue was non-exclusive, they could, would, and did sell DOS to anyone and their brother. Thus Joe Blow in his dorm room could buy processors from Intel, motherboards with Phoenix Bios' to fire the thing up, running DOS (and thus Lotus 1-2-3, which was what really mattered), and assemble computers able to use the literally thousands of ISA cards that had been developed for use on IBM PC's. Wow, ain't non-exclusive deals and competition grand!
Never forget that MS was there and is partly responsible. And Joe Blow in his dorm room was really named Michael Dell.
1) It's always been like that. As you said, some law schools are not teaching the next generation of litigators to use this kind of language, but many still are and it's an old habit.
2) Legalese must be clear and percise in it's meaning and scope. The wording is chosen to prevent any interpretation other than what is originally intended. (Unless they deliberately leave it vauge in spots, but even then it's still intentional!)
3) Intimidation. The sheer bulk of a legal "breif" makes it difficult for the layman to really understand it, and so hopefully they'll just take the lawyer's word for it
=Smidge=
Uh, the blogger was talking about people sitting on similar ideas in order to submarine the company later on.
You linked to an incident that dealt very specifically with the patented ASF file format, not some vaguely similar idea that someone is using to keep someone else from doing something similar. Apples and oranges.
Or possibly digital rights mangling.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
There are many ways to prevent businesses.
Microsoft has prevented many people from doing business. First, they controlled the distribution channels for hardware back in the day when IBM gave Microsoft an exclusive OS deal on the PC. When the clones came out, there was only one OS available: MS-DOS.
When DR-DOS arrived on the scene, Microsoft was quick to block it with exclusionary deals with the distribution channels. Sure you could buy DR-DOS; but since every PC came with MS-DOS (and *only* MS-DOS), what was the point? When DR approached distributors, they were rebuffed and told that their contract with Microsoft would not allow them to distribute another OS.
This is true even later: when Be approached distributors, willing to *give away* BeOS, they were told they couldn't, as Microsoft's contracts would not allow the PC distributors from allowing another OS to appear as a boot option.
This is not even discussing the products that never saw the light of day because Microsoft purchased the company and dismantled the product simply to avoid competition. Back in Java heyday, back before the blush was off the rose, Microsoft bought up a very large portion of the java development startups. They claimed they were simply purchasing the developers (essentially), but considering Microsoft never had a Java development strategy (other than hijacking the language), this argument is disingenuous.
Microsoft has succeeded more by regulating the market than by participating *in* the market. This is the one strikingly clear fact of the entire Microsoft history.
Anyway, this is a long rant; but I'm tired of the "Microsoft is soft and cuddly" comments. Microsoft *has* prevented others from doing business rather than compete with them head-to-head. And personally I consider any control by a single entity as market regulation, with or without government backing.
The major difference is, a corporation is vulnerable to something like Linux. As long as Microsoft is forced to compete on worth, they won't stand a chance. But as soon as they gain government backing (such as a huge frivolous patent portfolio), Linux is suddently put back "in its place:" as a hobbyist OS.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
DRM is being driven not by demand from consumers but from owners of copyrights.
DRM is being driven from fear of rampant P2P piracy. Blame pirates. The only way to enforce copyrights is to protect it digitally through usage restrictions, because few other things work. Hell, the RIAA can't even enforce its own copyrights with lawsuits without a bunch of whiny college students jumping up and painting the RIAA as a bad guy for protecting its own rights.
It sucks, but fucking pirates with their mindsets have ruined it for everyone and forced copyright holders into setting up restrictions to make it difficult to just fire up eMule and pirate away.
You mean the state of one arrogant country (America) out of an entire planet? Why, that country is degenerating to pre-1950 levels of prosperity. Other countries in our "civilization" will not have this problem, or not to the extent that we do, because they do not believe in Man's Right to Make Money Above All Else (But Jesus).
====---====
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
Why do people keep saying "convicted monopolist?" It's not illegal to be a monopoly. You're not "convicted" of being a monopoly.
If you said "abusive monopoly," that would be different, but "convicted monopolist" doesn't mean anything. It's redundant. Just say "monopolist" or "abusive monopolist."
Your kidding right? Think how long it took for the whole anti-trust ball to get rolling with MS. The next time it would have to get very bad for some fat politician to get off his/her butt to even get the ball rolling (3 - 5 years of major complaints). Then a few years for the government to get the effort "organized". Add a year or more in court and throw in one extra year for miscellaneous garbage. By the time it all played out, it would not matter, MS would own all major IT channels, software, control of hardware specs, BIOS, 1,000's of patents. There will be no practical way to compete.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
1) For now. They keep flirting with the idea, and people keep protesting. One of these days they'll find a way to sneak it through before it's noticed.
2) Not too far in the future, China will be a big enough market to sell infringing parts to itself. I'm sure they'll be happy to sell obsolete non-infringing stuff for higher prices to the US.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
They'll get fined in EU again.
No business in the world can afford to upgrade whole-hog to a new OS in a single purchse, and few IT depts will put money into a 2 or 5 year old PC. Bringing a new OS into their network that will not communicate with any of the existing OSes would be a huge waste of money. It's for this reason that TCP/IP was created for the DoD in the first place.
For another example take Nintendo. The original NES games won't play on the N64. Playstation 2 can play Playstation 1 games, giving the market time to generate new games for the new platform and providing the end-user an incentive to upgrade. Nintendo lost market share because an upgrade meant tossing away all existing N-1 games or keeping the old (and often unreliable) console.
This same lock-out will deny Loghorn the upgrade or addoption incentive. If end-users can't run their existing and/or proprietary software they will start returning PCs to vendors or refuse to buy PCs with Loghorn installed. Vendors will refuse to load Loghorn and demand another OS from MS or opt for a different OS vendor all togeher.
In summary, MS's Loghorn will die because it makes little economic sense for business that make PCs and for those businesses that buy them. In the end, it may be MS that kills itself.
Only the dead have seen the end of War. - Plato
I think the issue is that we had this situation once before, in the early 80's. Guess what happened? The more open hardware became the standard for 95% of the world. So if wintel becomes too restrictive - in terms of hardware like the xbox, I'm certain china or AMD or some chip manufacturer will come out with the Wal-Mart generic PC with Linux or whatever, and guess what - being open and able to add new hardware from 10,000 different vendors will win the day again.
Software I can see trying to be restrictive, but people just will not accept their computer hardware becoming like X-box hardware, where you can't upgrade, you can't add any printer or scanner or sound card or whatever. The masses are pretty apathetic, but they have shown time and again that because of that they will ditch en masse a product that makes them care about what they get to use with it for one that doesn't make them care.
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
I think the dictatorships of tomorrow will be democracies. Contradiction in terms? I'm not so sure. More and more, power is distanced further and further away from the people.
The EU is adding another layer, distanced from the national parliaments. The US has long since done that with an election system where the only stable constellation is a two-party system.
What EU is passing now, may be law here literally years from now. In the US, rider bills are tacked onto anything. In either case, the people doesn't know what's going on. There are political debates but those are galleon figures.
The actual issues are almost forgotten. It's all about style, profile, personality and character, not to mention doing your worst to the opponent's. Politics is merely the arena they attack each other in.
The real politics are decided afterwards. Not by the people, but by those in permanent power. Those that have created a circle of power around them, those you can not afford to be on bad terms with. Lobbyists, supporters, business interests, leaders of other government agencies all encircle them.
Dictatorships of yesterdays gave no choice. Dictatorships of tomorrow will give you choice that is no choice. The great masses will be fooled into thinking they are making a difference.
And you will be written off as a conspiracy theorist. Discredited is far more effective than disappeared. Those create questions, martyrs. Internet gives you a voice. But a voice that noone believes is no voice at all.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
That you can't just put two bios chips on a motherboard. Oh wait, I've seen MB's that can take three!
It couldn't be that Microsoft is tired of defending against bullshit Eolas style patents and wants to have a brutal arsenal of their own to return any unjustified anal rapes that might be forth coming. Look for their DRM patents to be held much like those of DVD's. To assume microsoft is alone in this is to be an idiot.
Microsoft's document formats will likely include xml/html. Microsofts job isn't to make open standards. I'm sorry you think it is. But it's not. Much like I don't have a dog given right to what I consider a satisfactory linux experience you don't have a god given right to your favorite ms tools on linux.
Anyway, the point being: the IBM "clone" became the standard because it was, essentially, open. IBM actually encouraged others to make PCs thinking they would have to license the BIOS. Once the BIOS was out of their control, that came back to haunt them but it allowed the PC to become the standard bearer for the next two decades.
In the 25 years since, the Mac has always been there, but always a tiny part of the market. Apple keeps a tight reign on the system which means no clones and no competition. It also has generally meant second class status when it came to public perception because "everyone uses pcs."
If Longhorn really goes down the avenue everyone has been talking it will require new hardware, a new OS, likely giving up many old programs people know and use, and (most of all) it will mean complete lockin in a way the public will easily perceive. That means for a time it will have all the same perception problems as the Mac PLUS it will have Microsoft behind it - a name no one I know trusts, and that doesn't just mean IT professionals.
This is a fantastic opportunity, and I still say it's only up to "the linux community" to blow it.
It was nice for a while there, Miguel - NOT.
There are always two - a master and an apprentice. And long ago, the apprentice became the master. ;)
"the idea is to prevent fully compatabile implementations"
here's one.
Maybe the idea is this - if MS patents stuff they're putting in their products, then they dont have to worry about bullshit litigation-only companies suing them after they release something ?
How many companies have one totally bogus patent lawsuits against MS now ? How many patent lawsuits has MS filed against someone else ?
The historical evidence indicates this is a defensive move.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
WinFS is not a replacement file system, it works IN ADDITION to NTFS, god damn. Its made to store data in the file system not just files and to provide richer meta data for files and to improve the querying of said meta data.
= /msdnmag/issues/04/01/winfs/toc.asp?frame=true
"The first point to make is that WinFS will not supplant NTFS--machines running Longhorn will still have NTFS-based drives. WinFS currently only applies to folders within the Documents and Settings folders. All other folders still reside under the control of NTFS. In particular, %systemroot% and Program Files are NTFS folders, which means that your application executable files will not actually live in the WinFS store."
Link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url
Patents were never designed for software, and it is becoming more clear by the day that they are ill-suited to the task. They are stifling the very thing they are supposed to promote: innovation.
What we really need here is a new form of IP protection specific to software, or perhaps simply a modified version of Patent protect without the far reaching gasp of the currently model. Maybe Patents for software should only last a few short years, or perhaps they should be solidly rooted in an implementation rather than a protocal.
The problem is that there's little incentive for a "guru" in a field to publish something that is obvious, and there is little incentive for a journal or conference to accept an application to present something that's obvious. However, there is a huge incentive to try to slip things that are obvious past the Patent Office.
Perhaps someone needs to start a "Journal of Prior Art" which would serve to publish as much obvious and prior art information as possible. Then we just need to figure out an incentive to get everyone to flood the system with ideas.
Having dealt with a Baby Bell as a customer (Pacific Bell/SBC), I can say that they aren't exactly wonderful companies either.
From what I hear though, they are better than the original AT&T monopoly, which was way before my time.
Can Microsoft really charge "monopoly rents"? Do you think Microsoft could get away with charging $1000 per Windows seat? I don't think so..
cpeterso
they overdo it. the world is changing (i feel in in the air...) na, no need to get pathetic, but that's just what happens to the computer world on a regular basis. some of you who are old enough (i'm not, sorry) experienced it: first there were computers as huge as a living room, the decreased in size, then came the wonderfull age of universities an unix, then there were pcs, and apple (yeah, the other way round, but frog is crap) and boom: no one expected that impact, there was the net.
i think that when the major players in a business start to behave really strange (i bet we wont see this tcpa crap on any average home computer) it is a sign that the business is going to change dramatically. c'mon, heads up. that's the last struggle.
beer as in "free beer"
Right now, every serious software developer is violating dozens, if not hundreds, of patents. But so far, people aren't sued (in large numbers).
What we are currently in is a Cold War of patent rights. Any large patent holder who first starts sueing en masse will get tied up in expensive suits and counter-suits till the courts find all decisions, i.e. hell freezes over. If this happens, small software developers will find it pretty much impossible to do any work without paying for a lot of lawyers, and astronomical licenses. I don't know what this will result in, but in some way, the software patent principle will go. It just can't reasonably exist. I just wish this nonsensical turmoil wouldn't be going to happen during my career.
blow your mind already
"Using a LWZ ("GIF") patent, which IBM has ignored up to this point."
Um No as I understand it they hit them with about 16 different patent violations
Also it is their patent they can enforce it or not at their discretion.
so whenever NT/XP/2000 crash, does that mean MSFT has to pay me some $$$? :-)
On the other hand, IBM tried to lock down the system through the BIOS. That had to be reverse engineered before the clones could enter the market.
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
Ironic that a believer in God would denigrate the ability of another to reason.
evil is as evil does
No this is completely a horrid idea.
By just publishing the information you allow the "bad" company plenty of time to submit the patent to the Patent Office, where it will sit for years, and get accepted of course, because they will never *ever* see the prior art. When this happens, the only way to rectify their "fake" patent is to have it overturned. That means you have to go through the entire process, involving legal battles, prior art collection, proving that it is obvious to a professional in the field, etc. And did I mention that there will be plenty of barriers to overcome because, well they got the patent already didn't they? Shouldn't it have been denied in the first place if they didn't deserve it?
It's a mess. The costs of doing it that way versus having a defensive-type patent are so much greater, it is ridiculous. With a defensive-type patent already filed, you could prove right away that it was entirely the mistake of the Patent Office. Nothing else would come into play.
Think about this: Your suggestion of preventing patents by publishing the information first is HOW WE DO THINGS TODAY! And look where it got us!
Of course there is one problem here most people seem to be missing. Having a large number of patents and a team of lawyers is all a company needs to dominate if the individuals it is targeting can't afford a defense (i.e. most opensource programmers). It makes absolutely no difference if the patents are truely valid (prior artwise) or not. The pretext for massively expensive litigation is all that is needed for said company to crush its victim.
Who do you think would stop them?
There is not a bright line. It is a continuum of prices. Obviously, if they charged $1 Million per seat, very few wold buy. If they simply increase their prices another $50, nothing would happen, and nothing could happen. They clearly have the potential to be highly abusive, while still giving paid-for politicians the plausibility to say that this is good for the economy / we support big business / etc., etc.
Do you actually believe that the US Government can control Microsoft?
They couldn't control IBM. Finally during Regan's presidency, Baxter (DOJ) dropped the IBM antitrust, after many, many (I believe 13) years of litigation. Why did they drop it? "Because the suit was meritless." The suit meritless? That reminds me of...
The price of freedom is eternal litigation.
They are just speculating on the purposes of these patents. My guess is that the purpose is defensive. Microsoft is a big target for everyone who gets a bogus patent nowadays. It is in their best interest to patent every damn thing they can that their software does, simply to prevent others from doing so.
This was the topic of Jeffrey Ullman's Knuth prize lecture [stanford.edu]. Well worth reading.
There is nothing at all insidious or underhanded about this practice, IBM has been doing the exact same thing for decades. The primary reason that companies, especially large ones like IBM and Microsoft, do this is to shield themselves from swarms of frivolous lawsuits. If these companies did not take out as many defensive patents as possible then they would become irresistible targets for the armies of unscrupulous lawyers out there looking to exploit the patent laws. These lawyers would continue filing lawsuits until one of them stuck and paid out the jackpot. Microsoft would be especially foolish not to do this because their large hoard of reserve cash ~40 billion is constantly under attack by lawyers looking to capture a share of the loot. In fact, Microsoft has so much cash that even governments, such as the EU, are getting on the legal bandwagon.
...have Microsoft certify your binary is safe...
When they can ensure theirs is safe, then then they can do mine.
Imagine a few hundred software patents assigned to the EFF. We could play the same game, by most of the same rules. We just have to start.
One very important lesson. The monopoly and especially lock in are the most important things. Even more important than short term profitability. Even more important than staying within the law.
That's what kills me. IBM was a wonderfull example of how such hard ball practices fail, in the early 90's they got nailed harder than anybody. If MS was smart, they would realise that free (as in freedom) software will dethrone their monopoly and do anything but waste resources challenging it. Oh well, brace for impact, all hell is about to break loose.
Maybe it'll take a whole seventeen years ..... by which time the patents will have worn off and everything they covered will be in the public domain. And, of course, software patents are unenforceable in some countries ..... the USA will soon be overtaken. See, people who pay for software are a minority. Perhaps one in ten copies of a closed-source application is properly licenced. Even much of the world's business relies on pirated software. Once people realise they can't use their copied Windows applications anymore, cheapo imported hardware running Linux or FreeBSD will become the order of the day. Unless Microsoft's DRM is cracked first.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Microsoft ramping up patents also ramps up the chances for reform; either:
Either way would serve to focus the patent debate; the bigger the companies involved and the more the issues get into the public consciousness, the greater the chances for reform.
IIRC, you're thinking of Trademarks.
Patents definitely allow selective enforcement and Copyrights may allow selective enforcement (I'm not sure), but you have to defend your Trademark.
If you don't it can become a generic term and you can lose protection.
Anyone need an Aspirin?
There are two kinds of people: 1) those that need closure
I can't think why on earth everyone is being so pessimistic, and I'm by nature a pessimist! This is the __GREAT_OPPORTUNITY__ for Linux/OSS and Billy Boy's BIG MISTAKE which will go down in the Hall of Fame of Business Blunders. Remember, the Underdog always has one thing going for him - as the Beast becomes increasingly bloated with its dominance it also becomes blinded to reality. The reality to which Billy Boy is blinded is the public's perception of M$ and consumer "demand" for a lock-in DRM OS.
Come on. You'd have to be brain-dead to pay for Longhorn. At the very least you'd have to buy new Longhorn-compatible versions of your software.
Look how long it took the public to move to XP - and XP was a real improvement of 95/98/ME. The upgrade time lag trend will be exponential so M$ can look at at least 4 years before anyone upgrades.
If Bush manages to get 4 more years in office our least worry will be monopolistic behaviour by Microsoft. The question remains of whether Kerry will do anything about MS if he gains office.
What's ironic about all of this is that there is nothing innovative or novel about either XAML or WinFS. Those are old ideas that have been tried over and over again.
Sure, Microsoft may keep taking patents out on their specific implementations. Sure, they may even sue people for building compatible implementations. What difference does that make?
When I write Linux code, I already can't interoperate with Microsoft GUIs on Windows and NTFS access from Linux still hasn't been declared reliable.
Stop worrying about this stuff publicly--it only elevates Microsoft's long term strategy to a level of importance it doesn't deserve.
Microsoft is making the exact same mistakes IBM made twenty five years ago.
I wish and hope this is true, but I deply fear this time it will be different. The way I see it is that there are all these companies, with all these defensive patent portfolios, who are all in violation of some sort of patents themselves. The only thing that keeps all hell from breaking loose is that most large companies have an unspoken detant to not aggressively enforce each others patents - less you have lawsuit hell.
If MS can't compete against Linux in the marketplace, than this detant will blow wide open and all hell will break loose. Once it does everyone else will be forced to escalate, and God only knows where it will end. I've herd of people being killed over a dispute involving $5 bucks that got of hand, but when it involves say 5 trillion - God help us. I say, brace for impact, all hell is about to break loose.
In my state, three felonies, buh bye,(might be 2 actually) automatic LIFE in prison. By my count, gates has been convicted of three now, his recent personal "gosh, I musta fergot, aw shucks" stock trading, and the fed anti trust suit, and in the EU similar, him being head schmoo over to redmond. I think other states have similar, 2 or 3 times, adios, have fun in jail. But, if you are REALLYBIGCO, it don't matter, because something you can't put in jail the legalised 'person' called a corporation, can't be locked up.
It's not time to bust up microsoft,that's way long past as far as I am concerned, it's time to get rid of the federal law (santa clara versus union pacific railroad)allowing *legal* "personhood" to a piece of paper with a stamp on it called a corporation, and put it back to NAMED human beings are always responsibile for their decisions. All incorporation does is give these goons a free skate and a legal shield to HIDE behind for crimes and to hide behind for taxes and to hide behind for campaign briberies, something joe sixpack never has. WHY is this considered "fair" and legal anyway?
It's disgusting. Not just MS, several bigcos out there are deserving of being dissolved, their stockholders left with useless paper and digits, then MAYBE it might sink in to companies and "investors" to not invest in being crooks.
man, this stuff gets me steamed....... and software patents? puh leeze, that was a big mistake a long time ago.... if they want to make it closed source to "make money" give them at most a 5 year copyright when they can keep it secret, then it opens up to the public. This forever and a day noise is too much too with copyrights.
Here is a sampling of a few of the thosaunds of patents issued on 4 May 2004:
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
obviously doesnt matter since microsoft doesn't innovate and they are a bunch of lazy people who make a shoddy os. Wait... are you saying those /. posts could be wrong?
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
was small.
Because the samba team havent taken their finger out of their ass to implement Win2K3 compatibility yet, genius.
This is a "blame the victim" argument. Microsoft could have chosen to make Win2K3 compatibility easy to implement by others. They could have chosen to publish specs. But they won't because it conflicts with their desire make it as difficult as possible for people to use non-Microsoft software.
When they do, you'll have your access.
And what if newer versions of windows are protected by patents so that no amount of volition on the Samba team could grant one access?
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
I want my operating system to be fast, stable, secure and to work with open standards and have an open set of application programming interfaces (APIs), so I can be sure that I'll have many software program choices.
Those things are what programmers want, not users, who'll be the majority consumers of Longhorn. Someone needs to do a reality check.
The large software companies will purchase the licenses necessary to do development.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
You don't even have to publish it in a Journal...you could publish it in your Online Church newsletter and it would still be counted as published....
i.e.
Our Lord Christ the Savior Virgin Mary Church of Obedience Newsletter,
May 5th, Wednesday night service at 6:30 pm
May 9th, Bible Vacation school starts
May 14th, sunrise breakfast
Please congratulate Brother Jeb for coming up with a process that uses a database that uses cookies on a congregate's website to make tithings through a remote payment system that remembers the congregate's information so future tithing can be done via a one-click process
May 21st, Movie night, Passion of the Christ
May 28th, Friday night bookclub discussion, "The Da Vacini Code" fact or fiction?
This would count as publication
Oh, sure, someone will get Linux to run on Longhorn PCs, but it will be just like trying to get Linux running on an Xbox. It can be done, but it's klugy and possible illegal and really not worth the hassle.
my xebian enabled xbox's only failing is that it's connected to the living room tv. an NTSC tv is a crappy monitor for a fifty-one year old myopic guy. but hey, my grandkids get an xbox game console and grandpa gets a network capable pc that doesn't suck at multimedia display.
i own the effin hardware, splain how this setup is illegal. not much hassle either other than finding a compatible USB memory stick and a blockbuster rental of mechassault and some very crude soldering of wires on my part. maybe sorta kludgy-ish, but then you should see the perl scripts i have running on my firewall for examples of poster child kludge (written with the aid of an idiot manual). oh yeah,the xbox case was never opened.Serenity now, insanity later.
While there can be no doubt that the actual implementation of the patent system is severely flawed, the overall purpose and approach -- using the granting of monopolies to encourage people to publish their research instead of keeping it as "trade secrets" -- is certainly reasonable.
That is NOT the purpose of any IP. The real purpose is to CONTROL information. It's to insure only authorized people can posess and distribute. The stated purpose that everybody likes to throw around is pure FUD. What we have under the current system is "new and improved!" and "whiter whites". Most truly useful inventions are locked up tight with IP law. We must rid ourselves of the concept of IP. Then, maybe, I can get a VCR or computer that lasts longer than five years.(Talking about the new stuff here.), most of which barely works when it's new.
What?
That's what kills me. IBM was a wonderfull example of how such hard ball practices fail, in the early 90's they got nailed harder than anybody.
After 40+ years of abusive monopoly control, crushing competitors, even in the 1950's.
Example: Early 50's. IBM discovers that Rand has an entry level computer way cheaper than IBM's hugely expensive machines. So IBM make their low end machine available for half of what it costs to manufacture! But with barely enough memory to be useful. Soon the customer would need memory, and IBM would more than make a profit on the entire system once the memory upgrade was purchased.
The book is just chock full of dirty tricks.
You suggest that such tactics fail. Well, I suppose I agree that they must fail eventually. But am I doomed to spend my entire career under Microsoft's control? Oh, suppose, by your theory that they fail badly by the time I retire. Who cares anymore?
Thank goodness, it looks like the industry will have some freedom much sooner than happened in IBM's case.
The price of freedom is eternal litigation.
We live in an age when people's pet dogs have web pages, and you think the bar for publishing is too high?
I can never understand the collective use of the Microsoft noun. Not that I'm trying to defend MS for their actions, but the blame for their previous (or current) ills almost always lies in the marketing/law/non-techie departments, which is rarely pointed out.
Have you ever been abused that same way before? If you haven't, that's innovation.
Ah, but once Microsoft gets hit with an antitrust suit...
Oh for Christ's sake! So what?! They've already been hit by antitrust suits and nothing ever happens!
Here in my country the single telco is little more than white collar mafia. There have been so many valid complaints about their behavior and policies it's not even funny any more. But from a population of slightly less than 4 million, they make approximately US$200 million profit per quarter. Because of that they are untouchable, since pretty-much everybody in the government and opposition parties have stock in the company, as do all the Big Money businessmen/power-brokers.
Microsoft will never have to truly face the music. They make too much money for the very people charged with prosecuting them.
that Janus and Lower Horn are so entwined. I bet Janus is gonna be huge.
C|N>K
What is the purpose of the computers - being a tool for the people, or making sure some rich suit'n'tie bastards can become even more rich without having to do any real work?
Welcome to capitalism.
Yes, but you are not going far enough!
Recompile the kernel, it wont work, not signed.
They don't just want all the money, they arent interested in money...
Its the power. No coders outside microsoft. only the corporate equiv. of script-kiddies allowed, and once moores cranks up so that decent apps can be coded in scripting languages, even that will be taken away.
Microsoft does not make all these apis soo big and clunky because they are a large corporate that cannot make something elegant and easy to use.
This is a mindgame designed to keep external programmers tearing there hair out with frustation battling the API and system.
Why do you think microsoft changes the core of every major subsystem every 2-3 years...
Cant have people getting to know the interface enough to engineer a decent management layer over it so that decent productivity can be achieved.
That abrogates too much control.
Keep the system fluid, force developers to restart their learning curves every couple of years.
Look at X, it has had the same underlying model for decades.
Ok there are layers of abstraction layed on top, but the basic core of static.
lock everyone else out of the "real" bare metal coding, keep the core to themselves. make everyone else subservient to the whim of microsoft.
DRM is the prize, a legal mandate to lock away our own systems away from us. To lock out all competition. whats next? Using the DMCA to force the uptake of MS DRM so as to lock out everyone else.
DRM ONLY works when the DRM scheme is locked away from external developers by a partitioning of the system into TRUSTED and untrusted...
By this, read "THEIRS" and ours.
Don't give away your machine along with your freedom.
Ahhhh.... I sound like a ranting lunatic, and I probably am, but lunacy is a blessed thing.
Final words...
In the end DRM is a trick being pulled on everyone to make them think that systems can have meaning embodied in them... "This bitpattern is an artifact with an owner, so can only be used in certain ways"
Rubbish, a bit pattern is nothing more than that and needs something to interpret it for us into some meaningful set of actions.
If any part of the system is free (as in speech), nothing is safe as everything is just a Turing machine.
Meaning free.
I read some guff today about MS DRM being able to lock down content even unto the analogue output.
Now I ask you, who are they kidding?
At some point the bitpattern of that top 10 hit is rendered into an analogue electrical signal that has to be pumped into some speakers, how can this signal be so altered as to leave it secure from re-sampling?
THERE IS NO MAGIC in computing.
No amount of pigopolist flagwaving will make computer systems into anything they are not.
What is bill going to do when computers are soo fast that an excel spreadsheet can be used to playback fullscreen video by changing the colour of the cell backgrounds to generate pixels.
Ranting off. Tired. Sickened.
Not quite. IBM lost a big lawsuit in the 60s over bundling hardware and software with their mainframes. The gist of the finding was that since IBM controlled the hardware, their bundling of the OS and other software kept fair competition out (Amdahl, I think). The courts split them in to two divisions - one for hardware, one for software and forced them to quit bundling.
It happened once, it could happen again.
Having been a juror on a patent infringement case (we invalidated the patent BTW), I remember the rules are if there are ANY false (may have applied to incorrect stuff too, I forget) statements on your application, the patent is void.
Clearly Islam and Nazism are not the same. Or are they? Take an objective look at it (as objective as I can be through the filter of being Irish Catholic) like this:
Both ideologies hate Jews, and fundimentaly, are anti-Christian as well. Christianity, like it or not, is the underpinning of western civilization, particularly in America. Read the founding fathers' works sometime. Props also to the Roman Republic.
Anyway, Hitler was hell-bent on world domination, as was Islam in its early days, and still is if these alleged "extreamists" aren't that "extream" afterall, which they may not be. Osama bin Laden won't stop until everyone is on a prayr rug facing Mecca or dead. It doesn't matter if you vote for Bush or Kerry or Godzilla. It doesn't matter if you are in the KKK or marching in the streats with a red flag advocating utopian socialism. It's all evil unless it is fundamentalist Islam. The same could be said of people like Pat Robertson, but no one ever hijacked an airplane or murdered children in a shopping mall because of Pat Robertson. Sure, people have done some diabolical things in the name of Christ. However, the crusades were a military operation bent on keeping evil invaders from the east out. Rome and Persia had been going at it for centuries before. Christianity v. Islam is just an extension of taht fight.
Sure, not all muslims are evil terrorists. There was also Schindler, so I guess not all nazis were bad people, either.
People like my mother (a spanish teacher who was a romance language major at Princeton, now working on her masters and doctorate in Spanish and 2ndary Education via William and Mary), and persumably yourself, will point to the so-called "golden age" of Spain, durring the time the Moores ruled. Well guess what, the alleged "golden age" is a bullshit story concotaed by the British as a propaganda measure to justify alling with the Ottoman Empire. Islam is fundimentally agaisnt Christianity and Judaism. They were brutal and oppressive just like the Soviet Union, the DPRC, Cuba, et cetera.
Frankly, I do not belive that the Persians and Arabs went from worshiping dark angles, djins, and the necronomicon to comming back into favor with the Hebrew God, when they have been the sworn enemies of the Jews since Abraham stuck his dick in that whore and knocked her up while thinking that Sara was barren and unable to have kids. I firmly belive that the Islam is a guise for Satanism and that if there is ever going to be a last "great battle" between "good and evil," it is going to be the Christian West vs. the Islamic and/or Communist East.
Religion aside, as frankly all theocracies are bad (Civil Government should be composed of individuals who are moral and realize that all rights come from God and that government protects rights, not grants/restricts rights), the establishment of a totalitarian regime that is fundimentally anti-Jewish, anti-Christian, anti-free thought, et cetera, is exactly the aim of Hitler and Bin Laden. It was the goal of Stalin, Mao, and Castro (not Che; he was a good man). It is also the traditional goal of Satan throughout the centuries. Therefor we can assume that they are all in league.
Saddam thought Stalin was the greatest thing since sliced bread. It has been proven that Al Queda gave money to Neo-Nazi groups in Europe just because they were anti-Jewish.
I am all for "tollerance," but that means I'll put up with Islam. I will never accept it, nor do I expect them to accept Christianity. I believe I am correct and they are not, but they believe the same thing. People shouldn't change beliefes without imperical data showing them to be wrong, or at least a VERY sound Philosophical argument. Otherwise I do not respect them (like John Kerry. Vote Michael Peroutka in '04).
However, tollerance can only go so far. Everything has a place. Everyone has a place (while I am a believer in oligarchy and the Roman Republic, I believe everyone should have the chance to better their station in life and then recieve the extra rights
Which is why we need a loser pays system. While it wouldn't be a total cure, it would stop a lot of these types of abuses (i.e. justice to the highest bidder).
First of all, I'm sure that this will provide more material for another anti-trust suit. It will also piss off people when stuff breaks and they can't get it to work. This won't fool savvy IT managers who might finally realize that moving to Linux is long overdue.
What has to happen now is that the FOSS community has to work like hell to polish our own image. We need to fix the interface problems, improve our documentation and create a nice comfy place for all those Windows refugees.
The days of commercially built Operating Systems are numbered. FOSS is the "disruptive technology" that will bury most of them. Let me give you an example of why I think this is so.
When you write a commercial application, you often purposely leave out a lot of nice things so that you can bring them out in later versions. You need those goodies so that people will be persuaded to upgrade.
Lets contrast that with an Open Source application. There is pressure to work first on the biggest and most important features. Many of the programmers working on the software are doing so because they are users of the software and want to improve it's features so they can use them. Provided that the project is fairly popular, the project should be able to put in new desirable features faster than a commercial project can. The open source developers don't have any reason to hold back on the goodies.
The place where this works best is the Operating System. Microsoft is constantly putting stuff into their OS to break old stuff. They worry constantly about adding DRM security. They have all kinds of bloated code that has never been subject to the kind of review that the Linux code gets. On the other hand, the people working on Linux are not trying to tailor it to match some bizarre marketing theory. They are simply trying to create the best OS they are capable of making.
I think the next few years are going to be interesting, but I also suspect that in the end, Microsoft and most other makers of operating systems will either have to open the source on their OS's or go out of business.
Oh well, somehow I don't feel sorry for Microsoft.
-All that is gold does not glitter - Tolkien
www.ra
quote: "Knowledge is power. Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Thus: Absolute knowledge corrupts absolutely."
:-) Surely that would be a corollary.
So what are saying? God = Cthulhu or something?
Furry cows moo and decompress.
Not really. Don Estridge, who headed IBM's Personal Systems division when the PC was introduced was the one who insisted to the top brass that the PC be an open design. It was after he was killed in the L1011 windshear crash in Dallas that his replacement thought in terms of trying to make a system around a proprietary system. If Don were still alive there's good odds that MCA would have been open as well. MCA was technically superior and too bad it wasn't adopted widely; it's bad rap is purely due to its closed nature.
My response is: Who cares?
... ANYTHING but Microsoft. Explain why the alternatives are better, from the standpoints of security, cost, upgrade-cycles, compatibility, etc. Maybe, just maybe, by the time this behemoth rolls out, nobody will want any of it.
Let me clarify. There are millions of people around the world who cannot afford a $3500 personal computer with a $500 operating system running on it -- in addition to whatever applications they need. They are swarming to Linux in droves -- from China & India, as well as other places. Linux is rising in the corporate sector: Novell, IBM, HP, and others. Unix/Linux forms the networking back-bone for many universities.
I think all this "Whoooo... DRM is coming! Microsoft is gonna make it where nothing works without it!" is a load of horse-apples. There are simply too many individuals and institutions that use and need alternatives for Microsoft to pull a Borg(TM)(C)(R) on the whole hardware/software industry. There will ALWAYS be alternatives.
Now MIGHT be a good time to gently prod your friends, family, neighbors, co-workers, and Joe 6-packs of the world in the direction of Linux, BSD,
I would normally agree, however 'trusting' MS to do anything proactive that doesn't have the ability to potentially rake in profits is dubious at best....especially since they are (for the most part) the ones trying to push DRM on the general public. It just seems to me that the way this whole scheme is playing out that my PC will never again be mine; sure, I'll own the hardware, but what good is that when it only runs what MS says is OK to run? Only then will it be obvious to businesses and individuals that they have no rights and are slaves to an OS monopolist. I'm writing this on a PC running XP (which I'm happy with overall, by the way), however if half of these new innovations are realized in Longhorn I will be investing in a G5 (maybe they'll come down in price by then; besides, I needed an excuse to 'upgrade' anyway). If my documents can't be read on a LH PC, so be it. Believe you me....businesses will find this out the hard way and MS will lose more than China or Korea in the marketplace.
[SIG] Remember Mattel handheld games?
Who says you can stop it? It looks like its going to happen, the uninformed WILL continue to support their HP,DELL, etc. DRM supported hardware, and the informed will probably purchase non-DRM boards from ebay,Soyo, Asus, etc. I think besides contacting your congressman, you should spend more time informing joe-consumer about this. This would work for spam too, see, if noone buys DRM enabled sw/hw, or rather the non-drm sw/hw sells like hotcakes, then there is no demand to keep selling the DRM stuff....but these people are so insidious they'll try to bury DRM lock-in mechanisms everywhere....we'll see.
Although, I think its going to backfire. What if the system were "accidently" set to play "unauthorized media" at startup, how much of longhorn would break? Or what about a new plague of viruses that create DoS attacks on your own machine by using an authorized program to manipulate files and make your system believe that all the data on your hardrive is copyrighted and you were unauthorized to view it? Oops, cant view user32.dll. Has MS/HP/Intel considered these issues, or will they just wait until their support lines get "slashdotted" by joe-consumers? Like:
Joe: "Hello, I keep getting 'copyright error: unauthorized access' messages on my screen when my son tries to open his word document, and he has to finish typing his book report by tomorrow morning, how can I turn this damn thing off?"
drone: have you tried restarting the machine?
Joe: yes, several times.
drone: Ok...have you tried reinstalling windows?
Joe: WHAT?!!
drone: Oh sorry, wrong script....Lets see here...Oh ok, you have to contact the IP owner of the data you are trying to access."
Joe: "WTF? He IS the owner"
Drone: "I am sorry sir, computers do not lie so clearly he must be plagerizing. I cannot help you any further. Thank you for calling, have a nice day."
...small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri...
Won't help even a little bit. A big company can lean so hard with very expensive depositions, motions, etc. that you will never be able to reach the point of determining a "loser".
Would you guys QUIT with the Prior Art references? There is a much bigger issue here. The fact that prior art EXISTS is significantly different from "because prior art exists our community is safe from patent execution".
... because we all know what happens to those that forget the past (or knowingly / passively ignore it).
The bottom line is this: If MSFT send thier attack dog lawyers against YOUR code/project they will win. The reason they will win is that:
a) YOU/your team DOESN'T have the resources to litigate patents (IP Law is a VERY EXPENSIVE industry) - trust me, you'll lose and close your project and replace it with a sad web page that reads "due to legal restraints, we can no longer continue development on ZZZZZZZ".
b) if you DO try to litigate and use Prior Art as an example, be prepared to sink Tens if not Hundreds of thousands of dollars to protect your open-source project.
Sadly, there is a much bigger issue here guys, and pointing out the fact that prior art exists != to litigating it and protecting yourself or our project. With MSFT's legal team they could EASILY prove to the courts that they invented the WHEEL and that ANY PRIOR ART is irrelevant.
Consider yourselves warned... There is a very big issue here, and we need to kick things up a notch if we want open-source, GPL, BSD licenses, etc to still exist^H^H^H^H^H be PREVALENT/Relevant in the coming years.
If you think I sound like a Paul Revere, you know your history and I hope you don't let it repeat itself...
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
LongHorn is a ways away yet... Linux has enough of a market share now and its growing. There is a market for Linux based hardware... Locking everything thing else out is not a way to go... Look at all the businesses that are still Holding their mega-legacy systems close to thier heart... This will Push them away from MS and towards Linux as MS will not Talk to the legacy systems because they are untrusted... If MS allows interconnectivity to these legacy devices that can be used to connect to Linux aswell.. They can't have thier cake and eat it too in this case... With what they are doing they could very well be Building thier own coffin... But in their patent frenzy this could be a good case to show how bad software patents are and how much of a monopoly MS has and the DOJ will be back at their heels and hopefuly next time they will deal the blows that are needed to MS to get them to change their Practices.
Who needs WiFi when we can have Packet Over Sheep! http://datacomm.org/PoS-InternetDraft.txt
Microsoft often use the 'embrace, extend, extingush' strategy when using open standards. A simple way to make their products less attractive is to intentionally break them. Microsoft intentionally break competitor's products. Why can't we do the same?
So we should fight back. If Microsoft extend a standard with their own proprietory extensions, then we make their life more difficult. Are Microsoft using 'unused' or 'reserved' bits for their own use? Reject the connection, or make it run s-l-o-w-l-y. Are they adding extra data? Quietly strip it out to 'guard against viruses'. Does Microsoft use a nonstandard IP packet? What a shame, it can't get through my firewall. If Microsoft want to mess around with standards to further their own ends, what's to stop us from messing around with Microsoft's unwelcome 'extensions' to further ours?
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
Monopoly rents are simply higher than the price would be with competition and not an unlimited amount. So no, $1,000 would be unreasonable. As it is, the retail price of Windows XP Pro *is* $299.
Indeed, Xbox is a learning platform for how to marry the OS with the hardware such that one won't work without the other.
You worry too much, my friend. Microsoft successfully married hardware and software DRM in the XBox, and what happened? It was broken in a short amount of time.
The same will happen with any other trusted computing or "secure" OS that *ANY* company or entity decides to put out.
Popular demand will still be the prevailing driver in computing trends.
You deserve +20 Insightful for that.
I agree with your foresight. I believe that is EXACTLY what will happen.
Like spam and spyware, it won't even be on the radar of the political crowd until it hits them close to home; when they can't open up the porn they just spent an entire day downloading, they'll realize that this DRM crap isn't worth the lobbyist payoffs.
Busting a nut is far too important to let Microsoft call the punches... if you get my meaning.
patents are good for most things, however I think this is a case in which the right to patent are abused.
It's All Politics
you'd be a billionaire three seconds after the patent went through.
Mozilla yet?
..sorry, southern pacific railroad. Right law, wrong proper noun.
zogger
If you publish and the PTO later declines to grant a Big Company a patent because of your prior art, their $$$ aren't going to change that. There's nothing for them to sue you about. Besides, their beef is with the PTO, not with you.
And by the way, moderators, the parent post was an opinion. If you liked the opinion, it should be modded insightful, not informative. "Informative" is best reserved for posts that reveal factual information which was previously unknown to you.
Unfortunately there is no "predictably cynical" moderation rating.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
"Informative" is best reserved for posts that reveal factual information which was previously unknown to you.
:)
Better still "Informative" is best reserved for posts that you know are correct, but suspect many other slashdot readers would be unaware of.
Twice now I've netamoderated an "informative" moderation unfair, because the post sounded informative but was factually wrong.
(Clue for moderators.. this one's offtopic
If you publish and the PTO later declines to grant a Big Company a patent because of your prior art
This step doesn't happen. Either the "Big Company" has to tell the PTO about the publication (they won't), or the examiner has to be independently aware of the publication (they won't be).
But it's already been shown over and over and over again that the USPTO can't even do a simple Google search before granting a patent. Let alone have enough knowledge to dig through all of the various trade rags and papers published at all of the innumerable conferences that are held every year. Do you seriously believe that this kind of defensive action will keep you out of court if a big company wants to tie you up with constant legal entanglements?
Answer, no, but not because they're "not really" monopolies. The reason is that they would have created a price level so high people would have been unable to afford to buy their products.
Indeed, Standard Oil is a textbook case of using pricing as many of the tools to prevent competition. In SO's case, they made a deal with the railroads so that SO made a profit on the shipping of competitor's products. As a result, SO was subsidized by their competitors and could charge less. Does the fact that they did mean they were not guilty of monopolistic practices?
A monopoly rent is merely a price that's much higher than it would be if there was competition. Microsoft can sell Windows for anywhere between $50 and $300, depending on if you're an OEM or whatever, and in all honestly, they probably could force OEMs to start paying dramatically higher prices. $1,000? No, it would make the machines unaffordable, but $200 isn't impossible. It'd bring the price of an entry level Dell from $500 to about $650, assuming Dell currently pays $50 for Windows.
One problem the EU and US antitrust authorities have is that they rely too much on fines without recognizing the ability of monopolies to simply pass those fines on to their customers. They hope that by forcing those price rises, it will somehow spur competition, but it ignores the fact that very few companies are monopolies because they're "cheapest". Microsoft has one because they control a critical set of APIs, disk, and file formats. Without something more dramatic than a fine, Microsoft can do almost anything it wants. They could fine Microsoft an entire year's revenues, and Microsoft would merely need to double their prices to get back on track. There's nothing anyone could do about it.
My feeling is that an effective antitrust authority really has only two options with MS. The first is that they can break the company up in a variety of ways. The other would be to remove or cripple Microsoft's basis for monopolization - the protection they receive under IP laws. A simple but effective way to keep them in line and force them to compete on the basis of innovation rather than stifling competition would be a requirement that every product over five years old be re-released under the GPL.
Perhaps under Kerry. On second thoughts, probably not...
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
because China, Russia, and RMS are perfect examples of liberty in action.
Moron? This is a troll, not insightful at all. Get a life.
Why? Although a PDF file on a floppy might not be sufficient, since there's no way of definitevely ascertaining the date of creation, what's wrong with a sealed, postmarked envelope?
Well I'm applying for a patent on my business /. by posting jokes
model of trying to get karma on
about filing stupid patents.
Or, rather than profit motive or monopoly propagation, it could be option #3: Microsoft may just not want a repeat of the Eolas debacle where they get sued for something seemingly public domain 5 years down the road.
s/just/also/ and I think you'd be closer to the truth.
The USPTO only has one type of patent. The "I want a monopoly on this" patent. There should be defensive patents, patents issued saying "we figured out how to do this on our own, we don't want to stop other people form figuring out the same thing we just don't want to be prevented from using our inventions."
These already are available (in the US, anyway). They are called "Statutory Invention Registrations".
But they are not much used, probably because they don't create proprietary rights, only the right to prevent later inventors patenting a similar thing (not the same thing, be warned, as preventing risk of infringement of other rights).
Here is a starting point for further info: USPTO details for 35 USC 157
-wb-