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So What If Linux Infringes On Microsoft IP?
Mr Men writes to mention a ZDNet blog entry by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes wondering aloud if maybe, just maybe, Microsoft isn't lying about having patents that are part of Linux. "Come on, no matter how much of a Linux fan you are, you have to admit that there's at least a chance that Linux does indeed infringe on Microsoft's patents. After all, Microsoft does hold a lot of patents and while Linux is open source and we can all take a look at the source code, only Microsoft has access to most of its source code so it isn't all that difficult for it to prove — to itself at any rate — that there are IP infringements contained in Linux. After all, before IBM handed over some 500 patents to the open source community, it's pretty clear that Linux was infringing some of them. Given that, why is it so hard to believe that the same isn't going on with Microsoft?" Even then, he goes on to say, so what if they do? It's not like they're going to go after us with a 'Linux tax.' Kingsley-Hughes imagines that, for the most part, Microsoft is just going to sit on this info and use it to form more and more profitable deals. Better than the alternative, I guess.
so I don't care.
For now, at least.
I guess I'm not on the same page as this guy. When I read about the Microsoft allegations, they're not against just Linux. They're also against Open Source projects. Either way they a lot of OSS projects rely on Linux as a platform and development environment. One of the potential issues I see if Linux goes down as "Microsoft Intellectual Property" is that these projects will dry up as no one likes to face litigation from Microsoft. Like when the SAMBA team cried out against Novell and I'm sure the Open Office folks wouldn't be too happy about this.
So you might be able to argue that Linux will still remain free to us somehow but I think it would be severely detrimental if not fatal to the applications that run on top of it.
I'm not a lawyer but I think that if the Linux kernel fell then a lot of the applications that make Linux great would be in immediate danger. I mean, this guy kind of scoffs at Microsoft claiming patent infringement but has he thought what would happen to projects like KDE & Gnome? I wouldn't be afraid of losing Linux but I would be afraid of losing the great applications that either stress interoperability with Windows or mimic functionality of a Windows environment.
My work here is dung.
Software patents are a cancer on modern society and economics and need to die a horrible death. I personaly find software patents immoral and thus I ignore them. I understand it's not as easy for companies like RedHat et al, but I can not see any solution since big companies has more bribe money. Sad.
The author points to MS's secret codebase. This has nothing to do with patents.
Besides, if MS tries to sue or extort money from someone for use of it's patents, they'd have to specifiy the patents in question, and be sure that these patents would survive being challenged.
I'd say it is cheaper to FUD than to sue.
Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.
It's not like they're going to go after us with a 'Linux tax'. WTF? That's exactly what they're trying to do. The only question they have is can they get away with it without getting hammered by a shitload of patents which other people hold.
It's exactly the same game theory which makes mutually assured destruction work. My advice with the current US patent system? Patent everything.
Deleted
Since when is slashdot involved in the distribution of microsoft's latest FUD? This story *here* is exactly the kind of thing they want to see happen. Where there no real news to post today?
Of course, Linux (both the kernel and the user space) "infringes" on many Microsoft's patents, as does just about every piece of software in existence, commercial or open source. How could it not? Microsoft has, after all, obtained patents on things that were published in open source software before Microsoft even filed the patent.
The real questions are whether Linux infringes on any valid Microsoft patents, and whether Microsoft's threats have any legal significance. That seems pretty unlikely: unlike Microsoft, open source developers tend to be scrupulous about avoiding patent infringement. That means that there is going to be no willful infringement and no patent infringement for any key patents. Or, in different words, Microsoft would have a hard time getting anything more than an apology and a quick code change. How they're going to get any business deals out of that, I fail to see.
So, Microsoft, please let us get this over with and start suing.
how much is microsoft infringing against open source intellectual property and patents?
....
microsoft just did an offensive move to be in the position to say "but we said it first, its ours" while the truth is, that they infringe against most others property without really having own
just getting a patent doesnt yet mean that you were really the inventor
You got it. I've been saying this over and over and I'm absolutely stunned that there are some people who still don't get it.
You don't even have any choice as to whether or not to ignore software patents. There are hundreds of thousands of them. Then there are several thousand new applications a day. I'll give you a hint. It's impossible.
That's why Microsoft ignores software patents. Even they, the richest company on the planet, have no alternative. And that's also why they're getting hit with a few 9-figure verdicts already. But they still play the game and pretend they're legitimate, because they somehow think they'll benefit, in the end, using them to crush current and potential competition with multi-million legal actions and the threat thereof.
It is mpossible to tell if any piece of code infringes. By the way, have you read many of these things? Almost every line of code does infringe.
Every line written is a ticking patent timebomb. Every player has to ante up and make their own "patent portfolio" which they can then apply against whoever sues them. If that sounds like it excludes everyone but a few rich, dominant corporations... now you're getting the idea. Only minor fly in the ointment: those patent shell companies that actually don't do any work except suing people, therefore can't be hit with a retaliatory claim. Ooops. And yet even after getting whacked by a few, MS is still winking and continuing to play the game. Shows you how much they hate honest competition.
Software Patents are currently ignored by almost everyone. But to the extent they are enforced, they will categorically end the American software industry, and software will continue to be a business in Europe, Asia, and... well basically every other civilized nation, who have soundly rejected this silly game and are by the way laughing their asses off at us.
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1. American directors have a legal responsibility to defend their shareholders' interests.
2. Ballmer says that Linux is infringing and therefore damaging other shareholders' interests.
Ballmer has no obligation to defend the interests of any shareholders other than Microsoft's.
First and foremost, copyrights and patents are not property, so don't refer to them as such. But it also leads to confusion like this article.
Okay, it's patents we're talking about, right? Patents are published - that's the whole point of them. They aren't secret.
So what? Their source code is of no use when determining patent infringement, only copyright infringement. So is it copyright infringement we are talking about then?
Patent and copyright violation are two totally different things. Copyright violation would involve somebody with access to Microsoft's source code copying it into Linux - a highly unethical and stupid thing to do. I don't think Linux kernel contributors are likely to be highly unethical and stupid. Patent infringement, on the other hand, can be unintentional - but in this case, his remarks about it being impossible to verify don't apply.
This is a case where the term "IP" as a blanket reference to very different rights is confusing the issue. His arguments don't apply to either because he thinks they are the same thing.
I think it's also worth pointing out Stallman's criticism of the term "Intellectual Property".
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Telling loudly a lie so many times that most people will start to believe it: a standard practice for politicians, salesmen and preachers. It worked for Iraq WMDs and on a bigger scale for God, why shouldn't it work for Linux?
Yes, it's possible that the Linux kernel or some big Linux app contains a bit of code very similar to some Microsoft code but that's due to the plain fact that the same obfuscation and secrecy used to protect closed source allows for similar code to be written without any chance of being checked for similarities.
That FUD is obviously a move to discourage businesses interested in investing on Linux after they failed the attacks based on performance and costs.
Aren't these ridiculous software patents only valid in the US? How much OSS development is actually done in the US and would that not mean (were this not complete rubbish) that MS could only go after OSS developers in the US only?
Given that most large OSS projects have copyrights held by developers all over the world, how exactly would it be feasable to stop a project if you couldn't go after all of its developers and codebase?
Wouldn't it just be easier for MS to bluster and threaten, all the while knowing they can't realistically do a damn thing?
How much Open Source Intellectual Property is Microsoft Infringing upon? How much are they using that they are not infringing upon due to a given license such as BSD?
There is a method in the computer industry between companies as to how they calculate teh amount of protection money they pass between themselves,
Take the granted patent paper work and stack it up, measure it and compare it to other stacks. The largest stack wins but the other have to pay protection money to the larger stacks. I don't know the specific formula as to how they calculate it, but it does happen.
So, the FSF can stack its owned stuff up but there is alot more that teh FSF does not own.
Perhaps there should be some sort of "count my work in the FOSS stack" method so that we might just see how large our (FOSS) IP stack is (and this would of cource count anti-patent IP prior art).
There are two efforts regarding software patents. "Open source as Prior Art" and a Peer Review project, but both of these are focused and supportive of software patents.
And that is the main problem, as software, by its very nature is provably not patentable. Problem is, neither side of the software rights battle wants to develop the proof of this. Human History has plenty of evidence of the usefulness of denial, but eventually this fact will come out, as facts of the earth revolving around the sun, the hindu arabic decimal system being more powerful then the roman numeral system of mathmatics, etc.
There is a quality and characteristic of being human, a human right. A natural right to apply abstraction physics. http://threeseas.net/abstraction_physics.html
Its really rather obvious once you get past whatever idea is keeping you from seeing teh simplicity of it.
The arguement that only a fool would think nothing can have value (re: the zero place holder in teh decimal system)
Nobody can break the four minute mile, untill somone did, and then other followed quickly as their mental block was gone.
But even if you don't see it, consider what it wou;d mean across the software industry, should such simplicity of programming happen.
The article author is conflating patents and copyright. Is it too much to ask that someone who (presumably) gets paid to write this stuff would know the difference? From the summary:
Having access to Microsoft's source code would neither help nor hinder anyone in deciding whether Linux infringes any Microsoft patents. The whole point of patents is that they're visible to the public. The US government even maintains a database of them that anyone with a web browser can look at! A patent holder doesn't have to implement the invention that their patent describes before they can sue someone else for infringing it. If they did, patent trolls couldn't exist.
Anyone could drive a stake through the heart of Microsoft's FUD campaign by getting a list of all patents held by Microsoft and proving, for each patent, either (a) Linux does not infringe the patent or (b) the patent is invalid. I suspect this will not happen, for any or all of the following reasons:
Microsoft, of course, could settle the question much more quickly, by just telling us which of their patents (they believe) Linux infringes. That's assuming they have any patents that would survive a court case. They must have, mustn't they? They wouldn't have said it if it wasn't true...
Just another wannabe fantasy novelist...
Translation: Microsoft has a weak hand in this game. It is easy to prove, yet they haven't tried to. If they had a full hand, they could point out at least one infringement to strengthen their case that there are cases to answer.
This also shows clear ill intent. If the problem was the infringement, the normal thing to do is to tell the infringer first, so that the infringement stops. Microsoft chose not to disclose their concerns. This means that in Microsoft's eyes, infringement won't stop. It follows, that Microsoft wants, what they believe to be infringement, to continue. Therefore, the infringement is not the problem, their grudge against GNU/Linux is. QED.
Considering that the wheel was recently patented in Australia, and that playing with string and parting your hair in a particular way have all been patented, I doubt there is anyone on the face of the planet that doesn't infringe some patent somewhere simply by living. Patents are broken and probably hopelessly so.
Creative Spelling Copyright (2002). May use without Persimmons
The fact that MS's source code is closed is irrelevant, because MS's patents are public documents. The problem for Linux (and other free software) is that its own source code is open to scrutiny, making it easier to spot patent violations.
> After all, Microsoft does hold a lot of patents and while Linux is open source
> and we can all take a look at the source code, only Microsoft has access to
> most of its source code so it isn't all that difficult for it to prove - to
> itself at any rate - that there are IP infringements contained in Linux.
You are confused. Whether or not a particular Microsoft patent is implemented in one of Microsoft's products is irrelevant to whether or not Linux infringes it. You want to compare Linux code to the published patent disclosures, not to Microsoft's code.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
> Microsoft could step in and do the same, but with real patents, really crippling IBM.
True. But only in a world where patents represented something approaching real property instead of the "shiny beads" they really are.
In the actual world in which we live, IBM would simply respond to MS with "well that's very interesting. Here's our stack of 100k+ patents. Why don't we see which ones you violate?" [Don't believe me? There's a very interesting story on the web of how they did exactly this to Sun once. Google for it.]
MS respond with "well our stack of patents will nicely knock over your OS business". To which IBM say "What OS business? Oh you mean OS2 - you stole that from us and rebadged it as NT remember? Ohhh surely you can't mean System 360? We wrote that before Gates was born, don't be silly"
After the "mutually assured destruction" cycle is over, MS is left completely without any business at all and IBM are still the largest hardware manufacturer, *and* the largest services supplier in the the IT world.
And they are still in the Linux services business.
Not even Balmer is that crazy.
Your entire scenario is not based in reality or history. Bizzaro world fantasy has had its day, stop frightening the children.
Plan 9 existed at the time but was not Open Source. Nonetheless, it was not only hardware-neutral on a platform, it was hardware-neutral across an entire friggin' cluster - something even Windows Cluster Server fails to achieve today.
Many of the commercial PC unixes were - by definition - dependent only on there being an 80x86 processor and sufficient memory. They weren't tied to a damn thing and could run any PC device for which a driver existed or for which you wanted to write one. PC unixes that supported the IBCS standard (Linux was one for a while) were also OS-independent, capable of running ANY application written for ANY OS that ran on the Intel architecture.
(One of the major reasons Linux has Oracle today is that Linux users were capable of running Solaris binaries as if native on their platform. Enough did exactly that that Oracle decided it was loosing too much money by ignoring the platform any longer, especially as it was no longer viable to claim Linux was too immature to handle an RDBMS of that size.)
All in all, then, it's clear that Windows was NOT technically superior (it provably did less in some areas, as I've been able to list examples), nor was it the most hardware-agnostic (again, I've cited examples of far superior agnosticism).
Windows won the desktop for the following reasons alone. It had vastly better marketing, it was far more aggressively pushed, Microsoft had no hesitation about overstepping laws, the GUI received a lot of attention, Microsoft turned being dumb into an asset and a badge of honor amongst users, the price was hidden by folding it into the price of the hardware - thus creating the illusion of being free.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I've been running Linux as my primary OS for the last 8 years, and contributed hundreds of pages to a newsstand Linux magazine. But I have to reply to your post:
This really is Microsoft's last gasp.
Dying animals lying on the ground take their "last gasp". Tiny, suffering companies heavily in debt and struggling to keep a handful of employees going take a "last gasp". A massive, intensely rich and enormously successful company with fingers in every pie is *not* taking a "last gasp". That's utterly absurd.
Microsoft has a vast amount of money, presence in all manner of markets, gigantic market dominance and extremely succesful products. It is ridiculous to suggest it's remotely near a "last gasp". It sucks, but the company has colossal mindshare -- for many, perhaps most normal folks, Microsoft *is* computing.
Free software is making desktop inroads and is about to make more.
I don't see much "inroads": circa 4% of the market after 15 years of Linux development. Firefox and OpenOffice.org are doing better. But, frankly, so much needs to be done with Linux before it becomes close to the mainstream. Users are endlessly baffled by the scattered development, all the distros, desktops, toolkits, library versions etc. Installing software on Linux is still alarmingly complex -- if it's not in your distro's repos, you have to wait 6 months or a year to get a distro update, or have to faff around with source code or "development repositories".
It's orders of magnitude more cumbersome than the SETUP.EXE that will just *work*, without having to consider if you have Fedora Core 4 with these three updates or Ubuntu 5.10 with backports or SUSE with this extra repositories. Software should be like music CDs or video DVDs -- you just put it in and go when you get the latest thing. Linux is nowhere near this (want the latest Gnumeric? Oh, Ubuntu 6.06 doesn't have it. Upgrade your distro (sheesh!) or mess around with this devel repo etc.). Windows isn't perfect but it's a lot closer. I do believe open source will eventually triumph as a desktop OS, but it's going to be something like Haiku or Syllable (ie not based around 1970s UNIX concepts) and take at least a decade.
The end will come swiftly.
NO IT WON'T. There've been very few companies with the size, success and capital of Microsoft in the history of the world, and they don't just disappear. You talk about it like Microsoft has one product, one market, and one way of doing things. Microsoft is enormously adaptable and canny, and will be a major presence for at least 15 years to come. Do you not understand that Microsoft can, and will, change? Guys like us *detested* IBM in the 1980s for similar reasons -- now they're pretty much our friends.
I just needed to point that out. I don't like Microsoft products, I don't use them, and I wish they'd actually get some justice for the company's monopolistic practices. But all this "last gasp" and "end coming swiftly" is so comically apocalyptic and surreal -- it doesn't remotely make sense when you actually look at success, money, market and mindshare.
Microsoft is vast, spread across many markets, loaded with money and extremely popular. It sucks, but it's true. They'll be around for a *long* time yet, and like IBM, who knows -- maybe they'll be on our side one day. Microsoft can and will adapt to work in whatever market and situation is the strongest.
There was a time before Microsoft and there will be a time after Microsoft.
If you laugh at that, please go read the poem Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley.
I think that the issue here is not "microsoft" versus "linux", but instead
"software patents" versus "innovation" (yes, you read it right, *versus* innovation).
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
There's a Mexican standoff in place in the industry right now, and it's been there for years. MS, IBM, Sun, Novell, Heck even codgers like Computer Associates all have enough vague patents to start a big nasty lawyer-fest should they choose to do so. For the most part, they keep each other in check. It's a fragile balance though. I think it's practically a given that MS has at least one and probably many patents upon which a number of FOSS projects could be claimed to infringe. Some are probably imposable to code around too, being on basic ideas like UI elements, file access, printing, or any number of obvious fundamental computing concepts. Sure, they should be invalid in principle, but you'd need to out lawyer the Beast of Redmond to prove it. What I wonder is, does really MS have the balls to do something about it? One would think that actually attempting to dust off Red Hat or whomever with a patent infringement suit would be much like the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. It could easily broaden into a wider morass of litigation like SCO almost did. Once the patent wars begin, where would they end? Starting IT Patent War I would have the potential for big gains, but who could foresee the outcome? Do they really want to risk a patent fight with someone like IBM? Could they justify that to their share-holders? I'm sure the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire both thought teaming up with the Kaiser would let them pick off lots of territory from Britain and Russia. You can't find those countries on a map now.
I heard a lot of Windows code was ripped off from BSD. And who knows what else they ripped off in their applications. Does Microsoft REALLY want light shed on the nature of its competitor's source code if that implies countersuits can be filed that would require Microsoft to reveal its source code?
This is a battle Microsoft doesn't want to fight. That's why it uses SCO as a small fall guy. If it directly chases Linux, it will get burned so badly in court. A court case against Linux would be such a major legal event that it would bring the software patent system into question, and closed-source companies don't want that either. Because there are so many examples of negative consequences of the patent process in the US that it risks complete destruction of the system.
Legal experts for linux should prepare themselves for an all-out war on Microsoft that will kill them. And like others are pointing out, they can't kill Linux. Not internationally, and probably not domestically in the US.
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
It's clear MS has jumped the shark. It no longer even pretends to compete on features anymore. The CEO of the company had just started to wage a war patents. The war is not over, it's just started but this is their waterloo. MS will implode, they have just started a war they can't possibly win and have de-facto admitted that they are unable to compete on the quality and the desirability of their products.
It's not their last gasp, that won't come for a while but it's their first step along a path that spells their doom.
Sell your stock now, this company has nowhere to go but down.
evil is as evil does
Current success does not guarantee future existence.
Woolworth
K-Mart
Caldor
Zayer/Ames
Sears almost went under a decade ago
Wordperfect
Commodore
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Coleco
Texas Instruments
RCA (RCA is just a brand name now)
Osborne
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Kodak (well, it has a faint pulse, but not much of one)
Polaroid (it's comatose, on life support now)
Service Merchandise
AMC
Packard
Studebaker
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Pan-American Airways (just a brand name now)
Tonka/Kenner
Child World
Need I go on?
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