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Microsoft's Marshall Phelps On Patents And Linux
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft's Marshall Phelps says he is running 'a licensing shop, not a litigation shop.' Bill Gates's intellectual property guru talks to Brad Stone about Redmond's new emphasis on patents, why he can't license Microsoft IP to distributors of open source software -- and why he shouldn't be feared."
When you have the whole market, you can only grow at the growth rate of the market. Microsoft investors and Wall Street are asking MS to look for new avenues of growth, and patent licensing is one of them (XBox is another).
It's extremely hard for MS to find any new areas that can get significant enough to impact their bottom line.
So expect a lot of litigation, or at least behind-the-scenes dealmaking.
No they don't, that's Trademarks. Trademarks can be renewed, and have to be defended.
Patents cannot be renewed, are valid for 21 years after issuing (in the US), and can be selectively defended without any fear of losing the patent.
Copyright also is valid for a time period (but that keeps on getting extended by Disney&Co's hired congresscritters) and also does not *have* to be defended to remain valid.
The most important defenses against patents are more patents (big companies give each other rights to use each other's patents, something Open Source cannot do) or finding some reason for a patent to be declared invalid, either by finding Prior Art or by showing that a Patent is "obvious to a person skilled in the field".
No matter what, getting a patent declared invalid is not cheap.
I've got loads of GPL'ed stuff I've not given away to anyone. You don't have to give it away even if you're a developer - you're perfectly entitled to keep it in-house. However, if you *do* give it away, you have to make the source available.
Apart from that, the GPL only addresses copyright. If there are patent issues, you have to take care of those separately before you can use the code.
Many companies (IBM for instance) have technical bulletin libraries for exactly this purpose; if they can't justify the cost of the patent process for a particular idea, then they publish the idea to record a date for prior art 'discussions'. Several of the ideas I had in development (in long past days) were published and not filed. I think its a good idea - but to be honest, it doesn't need to be a centralised database. Anything somewhere on the web that google can find would do for anyone searching for prior art. I think the real question is why the USPTO doesn't seem to think out of the box when determining if an invention passes the tests of being novel, or non-obvious for someone practiced in the field.
The patent holder can license their implementation however they choose. It is perfectly legal to expressly say that your code may be used by GPL applications as a shared library, the same way that LGPL code can be used by commercial source.
Otherwise you'd best get rid of the NVidia drivers, the commercial databases, and every other non-GPL product that runs on Linux. That's not the intent of the GPL, never was, and it's nothing but Microsoft FUD bolstered by uncertain IP laws which suggests otherwise.
The GPL is about ensuring that if you use GPL code for your work then it must be licensed under the GPL, not that the GPL can't use any libaries which aren't expressly GPL'd. Contrary to any fantasies the full-bore GPL zealot might have, there is no legal way you could do that, and it would be against the very spirit of freedom that led to the creation of the GPL.
Also note they are not talking about refusing to license the IP for specific projects, but to the distributor of the source. In other words, they've decided to play their patent portfolio as a market-blocking threat the same way they yanked all the incentives from hardware manufacturers who dared ship something other than Windows.
As far as I'm concerned, Microsoft has just expressly stated their intent to maintain monopoly profits and control through IP barratry and by locking out any company which dares support or distribute GPL software.
If that's not a RICO violation, I don't know what is, and it's well past the time we stopped putting up with this crap as an industry. I greatly look forward to Sun, IBM, and every other IP holder banding together and teaching Bill that he does not rule the world, no matter how much he'd like to.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I've got loads of GPL'ed stuff I've not given away to anyone. You don't have to give it away even if you're a developer - you're perfectly entitled to keep it in-house. However, if you *do* give it away, you have to make the source available.
Shouldn't that last line read "However, if you *do* publish the binary, you have to make the source available." ?? IIRC You don't have to give away (gratis) the product to be tied to making the source available. If the binary is not for internal use only (i.e. you're selling it, licensing it or giving it away) then the source must be also made available, and for no more than the costs incurred in distributing the source.