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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."
And how many of those 283 patents are based upon other patents which have already expired or are really not unique? (Many of the patents being issued today are only extensions of pre-existing patents which is why there are these long lists of other patents being referenced.) This is not to dump on those truly unique patents - it is to dump on those (like the usage of a laser light as a cat toy) patents which, to programmers, are so obvious as to make you sick that the Patent Office could actually issue a patent on the invention. As per this other /. article - there are a lot of people saying the Patent System is broken and needs to be fixed.
Someone put a black hole in my pocket and now I'm broke.
How many patents does microsoft windows violate? How about osx? solaris? aix? hp/ux? Probably tens of thousands.
We only know about the linux 'violations' because the code is open. I'm sure if someone were to evaluate "those other operating systems" we'd find far more -- because there is no open public oversight of their code. They operate in secret, who's the wiser if they were deliberately violating patents?
Also, do any of "those other companies" provide indemnification to end users? No, in fact microsoft's license is almost exclusively to provide microsoft with indemnification from end users.
Using microsoft or any other OS isn't likely any safer than using linux, when it comes to patent violations.
you don't want to see a computer/technology patent war. everyone would be guilty of something. Heck, IBM would have almost everyone by the balls if they chose.
Since patents expire after seventeen years it's wise to just let them go. It's definitely safer.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
When did we suddenly become able to patent Mathematics?
See the RSA algorithm. It is non-obvious, and deserving of a patent.
I can think of two ways, of the top of my head. Note that the 'equation' is, as with mathematical desrciptions of relationships, just a method of formal statment, and need not 'look like' a typical mathematical equation.
The first, and probably the simplest, is to use a formal description of a state machine. Thus, the system is normally in the 'wait for input state', and then it branches to a state determined by the type of user input. This encapsulates the interactive element in a single part, and closely resembles the typical structure of most GUI systems (with callbacks etc).
The other method is to treat the system as a function of infinite arguments and use combinator logic. Curry all the arguments into the function, up to the latest existsing, then as each piece of new input occurs, add another argument, and curry it out. Something like an RDBMS is probably better suited to this sort of desription.
This is, I think, an impure calculus - currying is normally invoked to allow description of multiargument functions withing lambda calculus which requires single argument functions. Nevertheless, I can see no major hurdles to describing a program in such a manner.
Granted, I've not had the chance to express any non-trivial programs in either form as yet (lack of time), but I think that some programs are better suited to one representation that the other.
Worth noting that there is no change in the description if the input is known all a priori, and processed from a file, or if it's all garnered piecemeal. Consider a shell script for an example where this is obvious.
A mouse action is probably best represented by a tuple of tuples, giving button down and button up coordinates - thus ((10,10),(20,10)) represnts a mouse drag action, and clicks fall out as degenerate coordinates.
Alternativly, for another option, look at how a pure functional language does a GUI. For example, the wxHaskell bindings for, (unsurprisingly) Haskell. Haskell (a pure functional language with lazy evaluation) programs are just an implementation of a mathematical model of computation. Here, the description is effectivly as a set of functions, where the 'user input' determines which function to run [0]. Techincally, this is no longer a set of equations, however I can prove that this is equivelent to the state machine description above.
Any errors, feel free to correct - this is all a bit rough and ready. I just felt that it was worth pointing out that just because it might be absurb, doesn't make it impossible. For example, the halting problem seems absurb to everyone whose not studied it (because it's obvious if a program will finish).
[0] Or something close to that. I'm not intimatly familer with either the language or the bindings, so I might be a little of with the description.
Software that can reliably pinpoint tumors in medical images is not "just mathematics."
As someone who works in the medical imaging industry, I can't argue with that. There is some amazing work being done in this field that truly deserves patents.
But at the same time, I have a hard time swallowing the idea that all 283 of those patents in Linux are of that quality. I suspect that they're all of the "so obvious no one ever bothered to file a patent until we came along" class of patent.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Basicly, the biggest problems with the patent system are:
1.not enough examination of a patent before its rubber stamped (if what some people here say about prior art for and how there exists great easy to find prior art for a bunch of these patents, then the PTO needs people who can find that prior art)
2.futher to 1, the next problem is that the whole system is geared towards approving as many patents as possible. It is more fanantially benificial to the PTO to approve a patent than to reject it. This has to change so that the PTO gets the same finantial outcome regardless of if the patent is passed.
3.It should be easier to get a patent overturned if proof of prior art is discovered. Also, the method of dealing with patent infringements should be changed.
There should be a single "Patent Infringements Tribunal" or something. All patent infringements and all cases where someone has claimed to find prior art would be heard there. There would be some kind of steps taken to ensure that friviolous prior art claims are not made.
For infringements, if the patent is found not to infringe in the case in question (or is overturned), the patent holder will be penalized. Ditto if prior art is found that makes the patent invalid. (although if that was introduced, things like the eolas vs microsoft case may not have happened because the MS lawyers are 800kg gorillas and the eolas lawyers are little tiny ants)
With the right changes, it is possible to allow genunely inovative software patents (although I dont like it, something like RSA does represent the investment of a fair bit of time Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman and does deserve some level of protection) to exist but the crappy patents (software and otherwise) to go away.