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.
...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.
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?
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...
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.
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.
No, the Justice Department blew it by giving up after they'd won thanks to a change in administration. Had they kept going on the course they were on before Bush & Ashcroft took over, we'd have two or three "Baby Bills" today, and the world would be a better place.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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...
Tim
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.
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
It's not functionality if it gets in your way; it's feature creep. Functionality would be adding performance enhancements. Functionality would be making it easier to interoperate with other systems. Functionality would be letting the file system be a file system and not a way to print photos, browse the web, or create new text documents.
Functionality is not locking out competitors and forcing your customers to buy more of your product (complete with all the security holes and vulnerabilities) just so they can get some work done.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
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.
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.
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When has Microsoft EVER used patents as a tool for gaining market control?
How about using patents to extract FAT licensing fees from removable solid state media manufacturers? Or is that too easy?
- Have a massive legal staff with nothing else to do.
- Have a portfolio of patents to cross-license.
The idea is that everybody is infringing on something, so the best defense is to just cross-license the stuff. This means that the more patents you have, the easier it is to defend against any potential infringement.Of course, this also means that if you don't have several million dollars to invest in patenting everything in sight, you are going to lose in developing any sort of commercial software product. Sooner or later someone will come along with the patent that they got last week that covers something you've been doing for three years. And then, since you don't have the portfolio of patents that they are infringing on, you have to either try to defend yourself in court or just fold up.
Folding up isn't nice, but it is by far the more realistic of the two options.
I do not see anything changing anytime soon here - it is considered just a cost of doing business to build a patent portfolio for defense purposes.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Slashdot | Microsoft Assembles Patent Arse...
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
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.
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
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
The thing that differentiates free and open source software from closed source is the lack of holding pieces of it hostage for money. It's what makes it open.
Having patents on an something atomatically makes open source software unable to implement it. Even if someone invents a way to get there and allows other people to use it, they are prevented from doing so by the patent.
Since copyright prevents someone from copying your invention in the software world, patenting software is only useful for preventing other people from coming up with another way to solve the same problem you did. This was not the original reason for patents.
You were supposed to be able to "build the better mouse trap" and patent it, not patent "building mouse traps".
Many open source licences (apache, samba) specifically say the software can't be used if any money is charged for licencing patents held on any technology inside. This prevents someone from creating a patent and sueing every company using the software for money to keep using apache/samba. They can ask that companies stop using the software, but they cannot ask for money to keep using it since if the company pais the money they are then in violation of the software's licence and must stop using it. It keeps unscrupulous companies from trying to gain effective ownership of other people's work.
The debate over patents is an old one. The benefits of having the freedom of to use knowledge and innovate vs the benefits of the profit incentive from being able to own patents. Open source software operates with the freedom of knowledge and innovation at it's core. Holding pieces of knowledge and pieces of software hostage for money can't work with open source.
I hope this answers your qutesion.
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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.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
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)
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.