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Munich's Linux Migration Raises EU Patent Issues
J ROC writes "Techweb has a story about the German city of Munich's Windows-to-Linux migration. It appears the move to replace 14,000 Windows desktops with Linux has hit a bump. Green Party alderman Jens Muehlhaus, who is a supporter of open-source software, has petitioned the mayor to examine the status of software patents in the European Community. The issue involves a proposed directive on software patents that is being considered by various European governments. Muehlhaus fears that a patent owner could issue a cease-and-desist order against Munich, thus hurting the operation of various city departments."
The article was a little short. Anyone know if there's a particular patent that's causing the problems?
** Sig-a-licious **
I would think that given MS's past history of "borowing" ideas, they are as open to patent issues as anyone else. So what do they suggest Munich (and everyone else) do? Stop using software?
Is Closed Source better just because it's harder to *know* when you steal?
Linux IT Consulting and Domino Development in Michigan
I wish I had thought of it! The only way to make the government see that software patents are bad is to show them that they've got something to lose!! GENIUS!
And you all thought Microsoft was just collecting patents for defensive reasons..
Just wait.. this is only the beginning of IP concerns that may derail the freedom to compute..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Closed source is better for patent-threatened users because there are contracts in place and because of "fitness for use" laws. I can't speak about Germany, but in the USA if you sell me something and it violates somebody else's patent, you need to make things right for me. And if "you" are some large company, making it right can involve patent cross-licensing and no cash changes hands. Outfits like Microsoft, Sun, HP, and IBM do that all the time.
Open Source is great, but as the licenses make clear, *you* wind up holding all the liabilities. There aren't any warranties, and there's no implied fitness for use. If Open Source software violates somebody's patent, it may be possible for them to sue you for infringement. They can certainly sue you to require you to "destroy" your copies of that software.
Hence all the concern about software patents.
EU software patent directive makes Munich's Unix migration difficult.
The moment Germany caved on Software Patents they ensured that free software would require licenses simply to continue to exist and be compatible with any commercial software.
Hence, any government (e.g. Munich) hoping to use open source or free software will eventually be unable to do so and still retain compatibility with common commercial software. It's a foregone conclusion.
Case in point: Samba. It's only a matter of months before Microsoft uses patents to kill Samba and all similar communications compatibility with Open Source software. How will this affect Munich?
I really do hope this brings the German delegation to the EU back to their senses, but I fear it's too late. By the way, the ffii site seems to be down. Anyone know why?
I think this is in fact good for the project. This goes to show that the patents issue (worldwide, not only in Europe) is becoming a growing concern for more and more sectors. Seeing that they are being careful about this actually makes me think they remain very serious about seeing this project get finished well.
That's an excellant point. This isn't necessarily a bad thing for Open Source. In fact, as things stand, it sounds like it's in Munich's best interest to press for an anti-patent answer from the EU. And as the parent notes, the two named individuals are pro-source.
This is absurd on the face of it. Open Source software is no more susceptible to patent infringement than proprietary software. This is pure FUD.
Smells like someones (it seems Ballmer stopped by for a visit) FUD is working.
Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
"These MS Office Licenses are too much"
"Let's tell MS we're switching to Linux!"
"Hey look, Office licenses for $29!"
"Mission Accomplished!"
As everyone has pointed out, patent violations can be found in all sorts of code.
However, the OSS community has historically been quick to write certifiably clean replacements for any code that has even a slight chance of being tainted.
Read the warranty you get from MS and find the bit where they offer you more than the GPL does.
It's not more vulnerable with respect to legal matters. It might be financially more vulnerable though as opensource projects can't afford to fend themselves even against bogus patent claims. Open sorce projects often have less patens to use for cross licencing.
In many European countries the situation is somewhat better than in the US as the loosing part in a trial pays the legal fees for both parties. That might make it less tempting to make bogus patent claims.
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
The only time that I know of end users being sued for a patent violation, was in the case of msft's sql server.
Why do they think that FOSS is more suseptable than proprietary?
Unless, they are afraid of a particular propriety software company, which has been filing about 10 patents a week lately (almost all for stuff they didn't invent).
The fact that Open Source developers have "shallow pockets" makes them even less of a target that (successful) commercial developers. Q: why did SCO sue IBM first? A: Deepest pockets.
Don't know where you got that legal theory, but it doesn't seem to supported by evidence. Certain end users of msft sql server were sued because of mfst's patent violation. I've never of heard of that happening with FOSS.
IANAL, JMHO, etc.
if being the first person to use any sort of programming techniques means that i have some sort of ownership, then i claim a lot of ownership since i've been an active programmer since 1961 and there were no employment contracts back then. should my claim be legitiment, i hereby relinquish my claim to any and all of my coding techniques and constructs - and donate them to the world to use as they see fit. anyone or any company that claims to have ownership of programming assets prior to mine, is just plain silly. billy gates copied dos from an ibm 1130, and his fraud continues today.
the concept that going thru a coding exercise somehow is a creation of 'intellectual property' is pure non-sense. it's just learning an environment and making it do something else. magic disappeared when the binary numbering system was understood by the masses....
Not so - they are less of a target for patent parasite companies but sitting ducks for monopolisitically inclined companies seeking to exclude competition.
Can't they change them?
Seriously.
When has the German Green party given a flying fuck what the rest of the world thinks?
Open Source is great, but as the licenses make clear, *you* wind up holding all the liabilities. There aren't any warranties, and there's no implied fitness for use.
And this is different in what way from Microsoft Windows? This is an exerpt from the Windows XP EULA:
Except for the Limited
Warranty and to the maximum extent permitted by applicable
law, Microsoft and its suppliers provide the Product and
support services (if any) AS IS AND WITH ALL FAULTS, and
hereby disclaim all other warranties and conditions, either
express, implied or statutory, including, but not limited
to, any (if any) implied warranties, duties or conditions
of merchantability, of fitness for a particular purpose,
of reliability or availability, of accuracy or completeness
of responses, of results, of workmanlike effort, of lack
of viruses, and of lack of negligence, all with regard to
the Product, and the provision of or failure to provide
support or other services, information, software, and
related content through the Product or otherwise arising
out of the use of the Product. ALSO, THERE IS NO WARRANTY
OR CONDITION OF TITLE, QUIET ENJOYMENT,
QUIET POSSESSION, CORRESPONDENCE TO
DESCRIPTION OR NON-INFRINGEMENT WITH
REGARD TO THE PRODUCT.
Basically what MS warrants is that if the media is scratched or it or the packaging are otherwise defective, or through defect Windows is not able to boot to a state in which your machine is able to perform its basic functions, then you are entitles for a replacement or refund within 90 days.
Beyond that any other warranty depends on how much warranty coverage your juristiction can force Microsoft to provide by law, or in the case of corporate customers on what is covered in a supplimental contract. In the case of legally minimum warranty I am now aware of ANYWHERE in the world that legally forces a vendor to indemnidy its customers from legal action involving patents. However, end users generally are not the target of patent violation cases--patent holders go after the manufacturer/vendor instead (even SCOs cases against Autozone and DaimlerChrysler don't involve patents--and they even skirt around copyright. They are basically contract disputes based on shaky ground).
In any case, Microsoft provides NO MORE WARRANTY than any Linux distributor might for a retail box or ISO download of their product. That being said, a major corporate or government enterprise would negotiate a special contract with the vendor.
In the case of the Munich Linux project, I cannot see how the city of Munich could be stuck with an order to suddenly stop using their software. The worst case scenario would be that the firms contracted to do the project (IBM and Novell) could be told to cease-and-desist Linux operations, which would delay the project or disrupt future expansion or support. I imagine that this would be handled by the contract between the city and IBM/Novell. A big enterprise customer generally is VERY through when it comes to risk management.
They can certainly sue you to require you to "destroy" your copies of that software.
Whatever the details, I've NEVER heard of a case where end users were ordered to destroy ANYTHING because it violates a patent. Could you give an example where, say, not only Red Hat would be ordered to stop distributing a software product due to patent violations--all its customers would be ordered to stop using the product too?
That would be like General Motors suing an aftermarket parts supplier for producing illegal replacement parts for Chevrolet Malibus and be granted the authority to send all registered owners of Malibus court orders to take their cars into dealers for examination and possible replacement of the parts. Such a remedy would be considered ridiculous.
Anything that makes politicians sit up and think about the horrors of patents in today's world is good.
The danger of course is that they'll think for 3 seconds only, and conclude that they need proprietary software instead of free, since its manufacturer then picks up any liability for royalties.
In contrast, if they could be made to think for just a little bit longer, they might realize that patents would only a problem in this case if they remained hidden underwater and surfaced later when profits were smelled. That would be easy for a government agency to counteract in advance, since politicians are singularly well placed to force patent holders to register claims by a specific date to assist in government planning. This would flush submarines up very nicely.
Submarining is truly the main evil with patents, since it prevents people from planning ahead to avoid liabilities, as well as feeding the parasitic squatter instead of the inventors. If patent holders lost the ability to claim royalties when they remained hidden, much of the problem could be averted.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
They're worried about being sued because someone on their network could inadvertantly install and run software that is patented by someone, somewhere in the world? Talk about a barrier to linux. Fear has grip. But what is the true mechanism, that breaks what is arguably weak patent protection in the first place? Same answer as last time: THE END USER FROM FREAKING HELLLLLLL
/platforms.
Why don't they make duplicate ghost installs and user profiles for each categorization of employee (in state offices) and update the ghosts when legislation and job function changes - what state employee users can and cannot do. They could do automatic updates on a schedule - that'd motivate consumers to
Or, don't enforce patents on software . . . Article 52 - Patentable inventions
I'm kinda fond of the dot-communism myself.
Stuff that matters.
actually it was said by Mr Burns, not billy gates
Click here to read about a patent case involving Rockwell and a lawsuit generating company called Solaia. They decided to go after Rockwell's costomers and not just Rockwell. The customers sued Rockwell and Rockewell is now going after the Solaia's lawfirm for making the suit. This thing makes the SCO case look like a picnic, but in this case only proprietary software and technology and licensing is involved. Now of course these end-users are actually big corporations like Clorox and Shell which is probably one reason the suits were filed. I have not heard of patent suits where customers at a department store or mall get sued for their purchase, but do not rule out that possibility. It could happen. The point is using proprietary systems and licenses with big corporations does not put you in the clear of liabilities.
I've never really understood the practicality of software patents. With closed source, a patent holder usually can't check the code to see if the software is infringing. With open source, it might be easier to tell, but there's less likely to be revenue to collect "damages" from. Is there a point to software patents?
...and then understanding when and where this purpose is being abused, contridicted or even out of date with the changing world economy.
Here are some patent information clips from the USPTO
Note the last paragraph: "Protection of industrial property is not an end in itself: it is a means to encourage creative activity, industrialization, investment and honest trade. All this is designed to contribute to more safety and comfort, less poverty and more beauty, in the lives of men."
And consider how FOSS supports that better then what MS has been proven to contridict that, in courts around the world.
I guess he's a member of the green-back party after all.
After reading this article, I was wondering whether it would be possible for Open Source API developers to place a clause in the license agreement prohibiting patents placed on software that use their API?
After all, if you create an API that is built from modular blocks with the expectation that users will use these to build more complex systems, a third party developer can't really file a patent on a particular combination of such blocks, as you could always implement a single block that performed such a task.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Huh - what gives? A German-related Linux story for once, and we're missing comments from the "I'll pretend I'm German with really bad English to get sympathy mods" troll that is Milo of Kroton?
Must be past his bed-time.
He manages to suck people in everytime* but just in case he posts later, here's proof that he's not German and is just trolling.
*The German Yahoo email address is a good touch I must admit.
(Trolling the trolls since 2001...)
Timeline Inc has won a US Washington Court of Appeal judgment against Microsoft for the right to sue Microsoft's customers, and subsequently sued Cognos. On February 13, 2004, Cognos settled at cost to Cognos totaling $1.75 million
In a lot of ways you are better with GPL licensed techology , which effectively grants all downstream users the right to use the patents from upstream developers under the terms of the GPL .
Software Patent are inherently bad but are also pushing an interesting trend. Pushing vendors towards adopting the GPL-like licensing as a form of simpler form of cross licensing arrangement.
I agree with what erroneus(253617) implied, even if it wasn't serious.
I think that the Green's intent was precisely to stimulate the reconsideration of the patent issue, in the hope of weakening or reversing the patent decision.
A few days ago, we had a post from the person from the Stargate website, asking for donations. Common sense would dictate that perhaps a more objective source than one of the parties involved in the litigation... oh well.
Today there was a Mozilla vulnerability thing and I clicked on the "proof of concept" and my X server almost locked up and I had to ssh in from another machine to kill it. "As if" someone wouldn't notice there was something wrong.
Now, this.
Where does one go to get an objective opinion of things. You know?
It just ain't right. People need to chill out, man... life ain't that grim!
After meeting with Scott McNealy of Sun, MS intends to assault the OSS world with lawsuits out the wazoo.
As part of the MS/Sun settlement MS cannot litigate with Sun over patent infringement. So MS is setting up Sun to be the number two software vendor. RedHat, Novell, GNU, Apache orgs should be put on notice that their day in court is coming soon!
I noticed the same but there's no reason to be worried. I do know that they're working on some new website design and maybe they're switching to a new website this weekend. Even if not, they'll be back soon anyway.
The TechWeb article is basically correct except that I'm independent and not a general spokesperson for the Green Party other than working with them (and others) on software patent issues.
/PRNewswire/ -- When the city administration of Munich decided to migrate its IT infrastructure to the Linux operating system, it made headline news around the world. That project is now being threatened by a proposed European Union directive on software patents. The directive is pushed for by the governments of Germany, the UK, France, and other countries on the EU Council.
Here's the text of the original announcement:
EU Software Patents Jeopardise Munich's Linux Migration
MUNICH, Germany, July 30
Software patents are considered the greatest danger to the usage and development of Linux and other Free Software. A cursory search revealed that the Linux "base client", which the city of Munich plans to install on the desktop computers of approximately 14,000 employees, is in conflict with more than 50 European software patents.
Today Jens Muehlhaus, an alderman from the Green Party, filed two motions in which he calls on the mayor of Munich, the Social Democrat Christian Ude, to contact the federal government of Germany on this matter and to analyse how the EU software patent directive affects Munich's Linux project. The politician, a supporter of open source, warns that patent infringement assertions could take entire departments of the city administration out of operation. Mr. Muehlhaus expresses concern over the future ability of open source software to meet the needs of the city administration if software patents massively hinder its development. Related caveats have been voiced by the SME association CEA-PME and by Deutsche Bank Research.
A week earlier, the chief information officer of Munich, Wilhelm Hoegner, said it is "indispensable" to check on the consequences of the software patent directive to open source software. Any such oversight would be a "catastrophe for Munich's Linux migration project, and for open source in general".
Florian Mueller, an active participant in the software patent debate, sees the EU Council on the wrong track: "Open source is a historic opportunity for Europe to save costs and create jobs. Schroeder, Blair and Chirac should demonstrate leadership and stop their civil servants from sacrificing the open source opportunity to the insatiable patent bureaucracy, lest some large corporations will shut down open source and many SMEs." Mr. Mueller is a software entrepreneur, and an adviser to Europe's largest open source software company MySQL.
The FFII (www.ffii.org, just that the website is inaccessible while I am writing this) identified more than 50 conflicts of the Linux "base client" of the city of Munich (from their migration feasibility study) with software patents that had been granted or are about to be granted by the European Patent Office.
For some background information: The European Patent Convention of 1974 does not allow software patents. It excludes program logic from patentability. The European Patent Office has been granting software patents anyway (in fact, about 30,000 already), and now the European Union wants to take a decision on the patentability of program logic. That decision could go in any of three directions:
legalize software patents all the way (that's what some of the EU institutions want, and it's the will of the governments of Germany, UK, France, Sweden and other countries)
abolish software patents entirely (that's what the European Parliament voted for in September of 2003, and that would be best)
continue with status quo (which means that the situation remains unclarified for now... that would not be ideal but still infinitely better than legalizing software patents in the EU)
What the Greens want is for governments such as the German one to consider the implications of software patents to their own IT strategies. It's not just that the city of Munich migrates to Linux. There is a "Migration Guide" book that was published by the German Federal Ministry of the Interior, and in that migration guide they tell, in no uncertain terms, every public administration in Germany that they should migrate to open source as fast and as much as they can. That type of recommendation is reduced to absurdity by simultaneously supporting software patents, which in the opinion of Linus Torvalds, Alan Cox and many other developers are the ultimate threat to Linux.
The European governments have a simple decision at hand: Do we want a competitive environment in which open source and small and medium-sized enterprises can present every purchaser of software (governmental agencies, enterprises, private households) with alternatives? Or do we want an oligopolistic market in which only a few powerhouses cross-license thousands or tens of thousands of patents at a time, and can at their choosing leverage those patents against their competition?
It's another question whether open source is more endangered by software patents than closed source. For the most part, everything that is bad about software patents simply applies to open source as well, just that FOSS is particularly successful at breaking into monopolistic and oligopolistic markets (as the Linux migration project of Munich shows). What comes on top of all of this is that access to source code makes it easier to identify and substantiate patent infringement assertions. In my opinion, that open-source-specific aspect is not nearly as important as the fact that FOSS is a strong competitor to various patent powerhouses.
Generally, software patents simply make software development hugely more expensive. Without software patents, you need to know how to program, you purchase a computer for maybe $1,000, and you can contribute to an open source project. With software patents, you need to play that absurd cross-licensing game, and you can't do that without thousands or tens of thousands of patents, which in turn means that unless you're a multi-billion $ organization, patents are only a risk to you and no protection at all.
I promise this is my last next-to-top-level posting on this thread :-)
:-)
Here's the EU situation. They want to clarify and sort of supersede the European Patent Convention of 1974.
The initiative at the level of the European Union started in 1999 when the European Commission started to look into this.
On 02/20/02, the European Commission formally proposed a "Directive on the Patentability of Computer-Implemented Inventions", totally pro-swpat.
On 09/24/03, the European Parliament said No but in a very smart way. Instead of just turning it down, they simply amended it to the effect that it was turned around by 180 degrees. They turned a pro-swpat directive into an anti-swpat directive.
It then went to the EU Council, which is the representation of the EU member states. That's where the responsibility of the government of a country like Germany comes in. On May 18 of this year, the EU Council reached a "political agreement" on a pro-swpat directive. Basically they dropped the essential amendments of the EU Parliament, went back to the text of the Commission, and even went beyond by particularly allowing "program claims". So the EU Council came up with the most terrible legislation of swpats that anyone in the EU has proposed to date.
Now, the press reported on that May 18 thing as though it were a final decision. It's not final at all. It was not a formal vote on May 18, just a tentative vote. The formal decision is now expected to occur on September 24, and in the meantime, the Dutch parliament has made a resolution that the government of the Netherlands should abstain. On May 18, they were in support of swpats, so technically there is no more majority right now but the EU Council procedure is such that the May 18 thing might be passed without a vote (just by no one protesting... they call that an "A item", adopted without debate). Every country that supported swpats on May 18 could still change its mind, including Germany. It's just that they usually don't do that because it would violate an unwritten code of diplomacy. The whole idea behind this "A item" thing is that they want the civil servants of the national governments to work out as many things as possible so that the ministers, who the Council is formally composed of, don't have to deal with each and every issue. The EU passes thousands of laws and regulations every year and the fewest are sorted out by the ministers.
Even if the EU Council were to pass its May 18 pro-swpat directive, that legislation would still not take effect. It would go back to the EU Parliament, and then there is so much that can happen in procedural terms that I'd better stop it for now and let's talk about this if and when we get there
The OSS community has historically chosen to ignore trivial software patents as much as possible. If this were not the case, KDE applications wouldn't make use of patented technology like progress bars, tabs and Undo/Redo functionality.
Good luck to Munich, and I hope the patent issue gets sorted out for the whole EU as a result. The original article says:- "Microsoft's chief executive Steve Ballmer interrupted a ski trip in Switzerland a year and a half ago to visit Munich" I'm curious, or perhpas doubtful is a better word, about whether the account of him interrupting ("it isn't important to us, but while I'm over in Yurrup I'll pop next door and straighten out Munich") a pre-planned trip to a particular resort, hotel etc in Switzerland is accurate, or whether he actually made a specific trip from the USA to Germany for the purpose ("get your ass to Munich and try and head off this disaster Steve"). Does anyone know what flight mr Balmer arrived at Munich on, which he left on, what accomodation in Switzerland he was booked into, when the booking was made, compared to the time of his Munich visit. Microsoft AIUI made a specific statement that he had interrupted ("no big deal, happened to be nearby, makes it claimable against tax if you can find something business-like to do in your holiday") a pre-planned holiday. Fact checking...
Thank you for your posts - they are clear and informative. What puzzles me most is the huge support of swpats by the comission, or rather the technocrats who are responsible for what is going on there. I would have thought that it is a reflection of the majority of conservative and neo-liberal governments, but even Germany is pro - how can the pro swpat lobbying be that effective? It seems to be so obvious that the only way for EU to compete is exactly to find an alternative to the monopolist (like they did many years ago when they broke the Boeing monopoly with the Airbus consortium.
People are incredibly ignorant. They allow an autocratic EU state to build, develop, and continually assume that everything will be ok.
The EU citizens cannot vote out a commissioner, nor do they have even the slightest influence on the council of ministers.
The so called democratic 'parliament' is an absolute joke, both watering down ANY democracy, and weakening it by using 'majority voting' and other 'levers' of EU autocracy. Even if your country is going to suffer under a law, it is being weakened daily in its possible influence to stop horrific lawmaking and enforcement. Your courts, laws, judges, employment, social justice, patents, the works are being taken from you.
Its amazing to see haughty europeans scoff and laugh at idiotic american laws, while amazingly lauding the EU, while at the same time, it creades amazingly bad laws, horrific compromises, and all with a mass removal of democracy for its 400+ million 'citizens', man I hate that word, its a word used by evil socialists, communists, and leftists, and implies a slave person who will comply with the stinking new state.
Citizen is oft spoken in the laungauge of Hilter and Stalin-alike scum bags.
If there is to be a Europe, let it truly be democratic, not this bastardised, evil, autocratic, 'utopia' for failed,bend and corrupt politicians.
The EU has not had its accounts signed off in over nine years, and thats by its own auditors, and that is far larger than Enron.
AdmV
We`re all equal
The EU legislative process involves three different bodies (EU Parliament, EU Commission, EU Council) but the two latter ones are pretty much the same on the swpat issue.
It is interesting to observe that democratically elected representatives of the people have so far taken anti-swpat positions: The European Parliament on 09/24/03 and the Dutch "Tweedekammer" on 07/01/04. However, the EU Commission and the so-called "Working Party" (a committee of civil servants basically) of the EU Council are pro-swpat.
There are three reasons why this is so:
Those civil servants on the patent workgroup of the Council are typically the national patent administrators. They are senior civil servants and some of them are on the controlling board of the European Patent Office. They don't need a pro-patent lobby to lobby them. They ARE a pro-patent lobby themselves. Those people believe that patents are the greatest blessing that has ever been given to mankind, and their own influence and career is linked to the patent system in one way or another.
Large corporations such as Siemens, Ericsson, Nokia, ABB, Bosch and others aggressively push the national governments of the EU member states for swpats. They might pay dearly for that in the end because they aren't really good at making patentable "inventions" in the software space but they believe it just benefits the large companies and they can then cross-license with the other big guys. Those European corporations basically do the lobbying job for the American large corporations that want those swpats even more but can't take as visible a position in the European debate as they'd like to (they do it indirectly through industry associations that they have hijacked, such as BITKOM in Germany). The political influence of those European corporations is huge. If the CEO of Siemens wants to talk to the chancellor (head of government) of Germany, he probably just calls him directly on his cellphone.
There are many companies, particularly software companies (not only in open source!), of small and medium size, which should be concerned over this political development and should collectively run a forceful campaign. Swpats will never be the mainstream political topic that, for instance, the war on Iraq is, but if properly presented, it can be a significant topic. After all, every public administration, virtually every enterprise and a vast majority of all households needs software. However, the management of most SMEs is too unsophisticated in political terms. I'm now making an effort to get some of them to figure this game out. Unless they are ready to join the fray and do something impactful (which is not just minor things like writing open and non-open letters to politicians), they'll lose out all the way. SMEs typically think that they should only focus on their core business and shouldn't ever spend management time, let alone money, on the political front. Large corporations are typically much smarter in that regard (they not only have more resources, they also do understand that politics are a business priority). The shortsightedness of most small and medium-sized companies in this respect is stunning.
It's nothing short of remarkable how successful the FFII and other anti-swpat activists in Europe have been under those circumstances, without a substantial amount of funding!
The continuing protests against the possible introduction of software patents need coordinating by experts in the field of politics, which most of the interested parties, at least on the developers side, are not.
They also need to be shown that the USPTO is a failed organisation, quite probably due to underfunding and mismanagement at the top, not one to copy. If they handle it right, the US will have to sort themselves out, to everyone's benefit except the Criminal Monopoly and close associates.
It would be possible, certainly, but I don't think it would be a good idea. Consider: the Oracle RDBMS runs on Linux. It needs to make calls to the Linux kernel API. Presumably, the Oracle corporation holds at least a few patents relating to their database system. If the kernel API is covered by a licence that forbids patented software from using it, Oracle is no longer allowed to run on Linux. Running one piece of software would prevent you from running another, which hardly seems desirable. It's bad enough when this happens now for purely technical reasons, without adding legal reasons as well.
Or do you mean that the API itself (or combinations of its parts) cannot be patented? The mere fact of its publication should prevent this: it should be prior art to any patent application. As we've seen, though, this doesn't always stop bad patents from being issued.
Combinations and sequences of the API's parts should automatically be prohibited as well. If your API has functions to perform A, B, C and D, then no-one is able to patent an API that does just A, B and C. Likewise, no-one can patent a function that performs (or calls) D, C and A in that order. Both of these should be obvious to one who has ordinary skill in the art. (Again, the patent office seems to have no idea of what's obvious and what isn't, but that's another matter.)
In the latter case, simply adding a clause to your licence that says "thou shalt not patent this" doesn't make it any more or less legal for anyone to try, because the question of what is and what isn't patentable isn't yours to decide. Many shops have signs that say, in effect, "don't steal our stuff." Would you therefore think it's OK to steal from a shop that didn't have such a sign? Would you try to use that as a defence in court?
Just another wannabe fantasy novelist...
This would have been lots of free publicity for their site, but it's down! Idiots.
all this patenting is acctually a good thing, ...
because you can't re-patent (or shouldn't be
able too) after the patent has run out
so after one hundred and some odd years of
patenting, there is definitely alot of good ideas
around you can implement for free.
me thinks if law firms are having a blast, then
detective agencies for patents must have an equal
good market!
keep patenting, make it free!
Furthermore, Microsoft cannot grant indemnification from patent lawsuits to their customers; only the patent holder and the government (since they grant the patent in the first place) can do that; the only thing Microsoft can do is provide patent lawsuit insurance to the buyers of their products, and I don't see them doing that any time soon -- the infringe-by-using nature of patents makes this so hideously expensive that it's basically impossible to insure against patent lawsuits.
HAND.
I was using Firefox. It locked up my machine.
Had to ssh in to kill X.
MS lost a Patent infringement suit recently, and everyone that was using the software was stuck with the bill with no redress whatsoever. Simply put, you have absolutely no guarantees with Patents that you're protected whatever your path.
It's why software Patents are such a bad idea in the big picture sense (I can see the legitimacy of some of them, but pretty much all but a few of them should never have been granted...)- and they're granted for some of the silliest damn things.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I think the question of how to best structure the EU, and how much power to give to the EUParl vs. the other institutions, is a little more complex.
Of course, the swpat story shows that it would generally be nice to have a European Parliament with much more power in place. We might say that now because last time the parliament was on our side and voted against swpats. If we had the Council and Commission on our side and the parliament against us, we might make some other points.
A powerful EUParl would be great but it would mean a "United States of Europe" type of state. The problem with a parliament is that there can only be a single method in place that determines how many representatives are elected by which member state. What some EU member states want, however, is for a more complex system where you need different types of majorities to make anything happen, and some are more favorable to the large member states and some are better for the small ones.
It's a strange mix-up of executive and legislative powers that the executive authorities of the member states have the key legislative power (through the EU Council and Commission) at the level of the EU. The swpat debate shows what this leads to: You have the national patent executives on a working group of the EU Council, and they push for exactly the patent legislation that they (and their friends at the European Patent Office) want. Yes, that's a structural shortcoming. However, we have to take into account that it would be a tough decision for some countries to cede more of their power to the EU.
Even though the problem is clear, it's hard to solve, and the best we can hope for is that the EUParl gradually gets more power. We also have a chicken-and-egg problem here: As long as voter turnout in EUParl elections is low, the EUParl doesn't have the standing it deserves. As long as it doesn't have that standing, voters don't turn out. Some EUParl politicians complain about the lack of media attention to the EUParl, and they're right, but it's the same type of chicken-and-egg problem as well.
Do they piss in your cola when they give out mod points?? Where does that anger come from??
Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
I seem to recall they had those blankets for sale on Think Geek... Happy hunting, though.
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."