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OSDL Says Patent Threat to Linux is Receding
blacksilver writes "The chief executive of the Open Source Development Labs (ODSL) has said that the threat facing Linux from software patent-infringement claims has receded.
From the article: 'Lots of people who hold a lot of patents have looked at this issue, and nothing's come of it ... There's always been a suspicion that some of them [the alleged infringing patents] were held by Microsoft, so this could be an issue ... our customer advisor people speak to people, including major customers who run both Windows and Linux, and they say it's not an issue,'"
did I get it?
A newspaper headline -- "Lawmakers Struggle to Define Gasoline Price 'Gouging'" -- shows how phony the current Congressional jihad against the oil companies is. "Price gouging" is one of those phrases that evoke strong emotions but have no definition.
Where particular states have passed laws against "price gouging," their different definitions reveal how slippery and arbitrary the concept is.
Kansas attempts to define price gouging as selling at prices more than 25 percent higher than they were before some disaster. Georgia makes it illegal for prices to rise after the state government has declared a state of emergency, unless the seller can prove that his costs have gone up.
What all this boils down to is that prices higher than what observers are used to are called "gouging." In other words, prices under normal conditions are supposed to prevail under abnormal conditions. This completely misunderstands the role of prices.
Why do prices exist at all? To cause things to be produced and made available to the public -- and to cause consumers to limit how much they consume. Why then do prices suddenly shoot up? Because there is either less of a supply available or more of a demand, or both.
When hurricanes knocked out both oil drilling sites and refineries around the Gulf of Mexico, there was suddenly less supply of oil. That meant higher prices and higher profits.
What do higher prices do? Force people to restrain their own purchases more so than usual. What do higher profits do? Cause more money to be invested in producing whatever is earning higher profits, and this in turn expands output. Isn't a larger supply of oil and a reduced consumption of it what we want?
Whenever there have been sharp rises in gasoline prices, whether nationwide or locally in California, Senator Barbara Boxer has loudly demanded an investigation of the oil companies. These repeated investigations over the years have repeatedly failed to turn up anything other than supply and demand.
The real irony is that it has been precisely liberals like Barbara Boxer who have been the chief obstacles to increasing the supply of oil because they are dead set against drilling for oil in more places and against building more refineries.
When you refuse to let supply rise to meet rising demand, why should you be surprised -- much less outraged -- when prices rise?
Yet there was Senator Boxer on nationwide TV, decrying the high salaries of oil company executives, who are making perhaps half of what a number of baseball players make or a tenth of what movie stars make. The insinuation is that their salaries and oil company profits are what drive up gasoline prices. But there were no hard facts to back up either insinuation.
Given the enormous sums of money involved in the production of oil, even if all the oil company CEOs worked for nothing, there is no hard evidence that this would be enough to reduce the price of gasoline by even one cent per gallon. As for oil company profits -- representing "greed," as the Barbara Boxers call it -- these profits per gallon of gas are much less than federal taxes per gallon of gas. But the government is never called "greedy" by liberals.
These political circuses have a cost that can be even greater than the high cost of gasoline.
We went through all this before, back in the 1970s, when oil company executives were also hauled up before Congress and denounced on TV by politicians. Inflammatory but vague and unsubstantiated charges went flying hither and yon on Slashdot.
This demonization of oil companies made it politically inconvenient to remove price controls on oil when other price controls from the Nixon administration years were repealed.
The net result was that the shortages which price controls produce disappeared for other things but remained for gasoline. Motorists had trouble finding gasoline and sometimes spent hours waiting in long lines at filling stations. This was the hidden cost of political demagoguery.
Nothing on my Linux machine seems to be functional. Trying switching to LDAP, it will give you so many headaches....
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?b oard.id=swggpdiscussion&message.id=25107&view=by_d ate_ascending&page=1
Sony Online Entertainment Community Relations employee admits to spamming online votes in order to place SOE games in a better light.
"Why did they cancel my favorite Sci-Fi show? I downloaded ALL the episodes!"
But, our customer advisor people speak to people, including major customers who run both Windows and Linux, and they say it's not an issue
Are customers who run Windows and Linux really the right people to be asking these kinds of questions? Shouldn't they be commenting on Microsoft (and other companies') actions instead of random customer opinion? Seems kind of random.
Copyright threats against linux are still alive and strong, right?
We wouldn't want the OSDL to spread such FUD among SCO investors!
Am I open minded towards open source, or closed minded towards closed source?
If a company claimed infringement over a patent which the open source movement had prior art on, what would the ramifications have been? Are there any lawyers out there?
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When people eat the FUD, they don't necessarily believe it. Instead they just add this to the risk pile: "Aww heck I don't want to have to possibly go to court...".
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Is "threat receeding" == "not an issue"? Maybe "no threat" == "not an issue". Maybe we've just euphamized "problem" to "issue" so much that now we can't even distinguish between "no problem" and "no issue".
--
make install -not war
You are a real company man!
So they say that Linux potential violates 283 software patents? Now I do not know that they went through every software patent, but that is WELL below the number of issued software patents I am sure, so was there really much of a threat anyway? Besides that there is always the potential of any patents being invalidated in court even if it ever happened.
I do not see why a corporation would be scared from Linux by this potential though. You are talking about a patent infringement that would affect the companies and people distributing Linux and not the people using it. I really think everyone sort of got scared about this at first, but realized the threat was not as bad as everyone was originally stating.
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
Among the companies that don't support the Patent Commons initiative are Microsoft, HP, and Oracle. The article mentions the claim that Linux potentially violates 283 patents. Unfortunately the list of infringements was not released, but wouldn't the OSDL be wise to do some research in order to determine the validity of the claim? Then they would know for certain if any of the supposedly sullied patents belong to the above corporations.
But hey, his people speak to people.
The deepsea floor cracks with the rumbles of Microsofts declining sales as software becomes "good enough". As the developers wander out into the seabed picking up the flopping fish of patent infringing code, the wave of lawsuits builds out of sight, until it crashes in with its weighty force, SCOuring all in its path. Stick to high ground and be safe!
Watashi wa chikyubutsurigakusha desu.
We know that patenting something is 'generally speaking' a good idea.
Patentes, were made to create a protection for Innovations, but rigth now, to define what is an innovation and what is not, is hard, even for experts...
Maybe you shoudl be able to patent, the hole source code of a program, but not the idea that implements the code.
Almos any problem, can be solved in many ways. The particular way of solving particular problem, is what should be patented.
Not the general description of the problem, and this is what is seems happening at the Patents Office...
And since, there are many problems "patented" and may solutions addressing the problem, mostly at software designing, then, trying to enforce patents at Sotfware Industry create this patent agony we are living, were patents are used as weapons, not as shields...
What and How, shoudl be specifically patented, not the idea...
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The entire boogeyman of some company destroying Linux via a patent suit never really threatened most of us in the first place.
Why, you might ask?
Because most of us don't really care. Patents count as a silly abstract nuissance for business-folk, not for hobbyist developers. Treble damages? 3 * $0 = $0. No doubt some lawyer will point out that other dangers exist, but really, I (and I doubt most of us) really lose sleep over the idea that our use, or even code contributions, of Linux may violate some obscure submarine patent waiting to spring out at us.
Or to look at it another way: If the USSC banned Linux tomorrow due to it infringing some patent - How many of you would run out and buy XP to "fix" all your now-illegal machines?
The patent threat is held in check because of a deadlock of sorts. MS has some patents, but then again so does IBM, Oracle, etc. The first use of patents by MS against Linux will trigger retaliation from MS competitors. If all of the patents were enforced simultaneously, the IT industry would grind to a halt.
.44 Magnum, armed robbery becomes nearly impossible. Some people might want to take all the guns away, but it's easier (and almost as effective) to make sure everyone has one.
The best we can hope for is a massive proliferation of patents. The more, the better, so as to create gridlock. USPTO likes it this way -- more power to 'em.
Imagine that patent as the paper equivalent of a handgun. They can be used for crime or defense against crime. Armed criminals are a real problem -- they can rob people at-will. But if EVERYONE is packing a
It was a dark and stormy night for the enemies of Linux...their last great hope dashed, they moaned about the dearth of weapons at their disposal. Even though Microsoft tries to hire creative people, they realized too late that this criteria had not been applied to the hiring of their legal department, and SCO had never even heard of creativity, so they decided that maybe learning more about creativity would be the best next step. But someone pointed out that this would be counter to their ultra-secret missional mantra, so that was nixed right off the bat. Any other suggestions?
Linux is de-centralized so it cant ever be killed like other companies can by patents and other lawsuits, just ask SCO, you'd literally have to win against hundreds of companies worldwide and even then people are always going to be modifying the source on an individual level. It's everywhere.
Patents are not a shield. They are a sword. When a competitor tries to stab you with his patent, you draw out your own and, all else being more or less equal, he may agree to leave you be rather than risk you killing his business.
Patent "trolls" are not competitors. They are file-drawer companies that don't make anything and don't sell anything. You cannot kill a troll's business with your patent sword because they have no business.
Patent pools are no defense against trolls. Linux companies are no safer than anyone else when the troll demands a piece of their profits.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
Our software patent supporting corporate backers have told me to say that these patents are no longer an issue.
In other news, the man pointing a loaded gun at your cranium is no longer a threat.
Maybe a lot of patent holders know IBM, or other companies holding a lot of patents and have an interest in Linux, could fight fire with fire.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Dateline the Mediterranean: the estates of Plato and Aristotle are claiming that Linux infringes on their patents for "logic", since logic is an intrinsic part of the operating system. There is no word on whether suits will be filed with the World Court.
I say this a lot -- the idea of the software patent is absurd, as much so as patenting genes. Patents in the United States were originally thought of as a means to allow Federal support of science. The idea was to stimulate creativity and industrial innovation and allow inventors to reap the benefits of their inventions. The patent process was meant to be strictly controlled and only the most original ideas and variants on common ideas were granted patents.
Software is generally a commodity, not an invention. If I come up with a novel way of parsing files, storing data, or even creating better processing throughput, perhaps that may be thought of as unique, but the fact is I'm using a programming language that others have access to as well as systems others have access to, and there's every possibility that someone else may have had the same idea.
It comes down the fact the ideas are not proprietary -- anyone can have them. What you choose to do with them is your business. Frankly, I like the Open Source approach, simply from the standpoint of it being a sharing-the-wealth system, that avoids a lot of reinventing-the-wheel that goes on in this world. It gives everyone the opportunity to advance systems and apply new ideas to technology. It is the complete antithesis of the patent model, as it presupposes that developments in software are to be shared, not hoarded.
This whole linux patent business is not over by a longshot, especially since Microsoft has not enterred the fray.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
So Linux can blissfully ignore the patent infringment problem, and as long as Linux isn't sued into non-existence, we can say it's not a problem.
My second favorite saying is "Remember lingerie?" from the movie Road Warrior. Maybe one day we'll be sitting around and saying "Remember Linux?"
However, as the alleged 283 patents were never named, it's impossible to say whether they are all included in Patent Commons.
That's an incredibly short-sighted opinion. "Hey, we could potentially have problems, but since no one said anything for a few months, we must be okay. Danger averted!"
What is needed now is no protection shield against software patents.
What is needed now is an American equivalent to the European campaign effort. It is possible to abolish software patents and this is the way to go.
So where is the US campaign?
According to his Software COmpany, they are still going strong. Just remember, they already demanded the 2.7 linux kernel code from IBM. They will soon go after other companies working on this secret code branch:
- Novell, you know, the compagny who actually owns the patents SCO is sueing IBM about.
- slackware: Infringing on it since the previous millenium, so more than 1000 years already
- Users: What the RIAA can do, we can do too! You run linux at home, we will sue you!
Anyway, Darling was at it again.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
Urge to license rising... Rising... receding... receding... rising... receding... gone...
...my dick : "Automatic injection apparatus for seemen".
Any of you dudes are now owing me $100 for each ejeculation...
If you are married you may just pay $300 a month if you only fuck with your wife...
I am preparing an EULA together with my lawyers, look for it in your mailbox.
I think everyone knows that illustration from Mad Magazine?
I used to be certain it would be some kind of frontal assault on distros regarding a codec or something like that, but I've gotten a little older and am certain I don't know. I just know it's going to come as a surprise and be extremely effective.
"Chilling effect" is the phrase that sums it up.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Why build a society based on fear?
Soooo would you say the patent threat level is orange? or yellow?
You can't easily destroy Linux via a patent. To do so would require that the patent was very broad and very hard to work around. It would also have to be something core to the kernel or other core packages.
So if a patent infringement allegation was made, I bet that the patent would be worked around well before it would even make it to court. Yes, there would be FUD but that would be it. The rate of response to the issue would probably eventually become a selling point of the OS and give it an advantage compared to Windows.
So the SCOTUS is not going to ban Linux. It might ban specific code from Linux.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
You might be able to allege that all the software they use is infringing on your patents and therefore they are barred from using this software....
Patens cover use, don't forget.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Dece8tra7ized
where you use a firewall? What are you afraid of?
Oh, you aren't afraid of going on the net now, because you have an appropriate self defense tool and the skills to use it? That maybe it's better to have and maybe not need, than not have and possibly need?
It was a good analogy, and actually a good literal philosopy and policy.
Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out!
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.