Patent Concerns Unlikely To Nix Munich Linux Plan

MonkeyDev writes "Yahoo is reporting that Munich is ready to move forward with plans to 'abandon Microsoft Windows in favor of upstart rival Linux. The council is expected to take a calculated risk and vote through the move, despite concerns about possible software patent infringements in the face of coming European Union legislation that caused months of delay.' Not everyone is excited about it. A software developer at MySQL claims 'Linux violates 283 U.S. software patents.' How does the Linux community respond to these claims?" (Florian Mueller, the MySQL developer mentioned, isn't opposed to Munich using Linux, though -- just the opposite.) Update: 09/29 02:22 GMT by T : Marten Mickos of MySQL AB writes with a correction: "Florian Müller is an independent software developer and entrepreneur. He is ALSO an advisor to MySQL AB but he does not work for the company. He is presently engaged in coordinating opposition against software patents in EU, and thereby doing all of us within free software and open source a great favour."

Comments

claims ?

[Anonymous Coward]

A software developer at MySQL claims 'Linux violates 283 U.S. software patents.' How does the Linux community respond to these claims?"

Hmmm, easy answer : back up your claims, show us the list.

These are US software patents

[virgil_attack]

Why would these guys in Munich be concerned with violating US software patents? Just as long as they don't become European software patents (although that doesn't look like happening).

re violation of n US patents

[pfriedma]

I wish that developers would, instead of noting that such violations exist, correct them. Now... this is not always possible... for instance, I'm sure that a patent or copyright exists for "displaying multiple pages through the use of a clickable scroll bar" and undoubtedly, more than one OS has this functionality. Perhaps the issue will boil down to not whether or not parts of Linux violate copyrights but rather, whether or not said copyrights are even enforceable in the first place?

Re:re violation of n US patents

[ThogScully]

That's the point... largely, software patents don't deal with truly clever ways of accomplishing things. They deal with obvious things that are practically accepted as standard methods of doing things. They are written to prevent other projects from achieving interoperation without stepping on patents.

If software patents only covered truly novel ideas like the patent system was initially designed to do, then no one would have a problem with them.

I look at it like this... good patents cover the way something is accomplished and bad patents cover the accomplishment. A good patent something like a particular method of preparing a chemical that is particuarly difficult normally to prepare. A bad patent is patenting that chemical, regardless of how it's prepared, as if that chemical's existence is owed to the patent holder.

It's hard to make up a good example of this with software, because any program you use, you're only seeing the output, but that may well be the patented methods, like a scrollbar in your example, which could be implemented many different ways of course.

-N

Upstart?

[Slapdash X. Hashbang]

when does Linux stop being an "upstart" in the popular press? It's getting on to 15 years old, and it's quite prevalent already.

Re:Upstart?

[pHatidic]

An operating system is upstart when someone you know is using it, it becomes prevalent when you yourself start to use it.

Re:Wrong Job

[jdhutchins]

Linux using patented ideas may or may be a great problem. Some of these patents are probably in code contributed by companies. When you open up code under the GPL, you are also saying you won't use those patents against derivatives of that code (that's part of the GPL). So 'violating' may be the wrong word in this case, becuase is (hopefully all) of the cases, they've been given to the Linux movement.

Besides, I'm sure Microsoft has looked into patents that Linux might violate, becuase they're looking to destroy Linux, and a legimate patent claim would certaintly help. If they had found something, I'm sure they would have used it by now.

If patents applied to law practices...

[MCRocker]

It's interesting to note that patents apply to all sorts of unlikely things like software and business processes, but not to legal strategies, practices or processes. It seems as if the lawyers realized how badly that would muck them up and haven't applied the patent pricipals to their own field. I guess that there's lots of money to be made from messing up everyone else's business, but not their own.

It would be very bizarre to hear an objection to a legal argument because someone else owned the right to make arguments of they style that the motion used. Perhaps only Johny Cochraine could "play the race card" or something like that. Every other law firm might have to pay him a royalty to use the argument.

If someone could come up with a clear demonstration showing that software patents are as sensible as legal strategy patents, then I'll bet that the supreme court would overturn the current incarnation of the patent laws in a heart beat.