Microsoft Loses South Korea Patent Ruling

mikesd81 writes "Ars Technica is carrying an article discussing Microsoft's denial for an appeal in a South Korean patent infringement case. The case focused on the automatic translation between English and Korean in Microsoft Office and was brought against the company in 2000. The Supreme Court of South Korea ruled that the patents are effective for technologies switching the input mode between Korean and English." From the article: "Technology firm P&IB, which sued Microsoft on behalf of Professor Lee, wants Microsoft to ante up to the tune of W70 billion ($75 million) in a separate lawsuit covering damages. 'Microsoft adapted our technologies to its Office package without dealing with Prof. Lee and it claimed the patents were not effective in the court,' P&IB President Kim Kil-hae told The Korea Times."

Comments

Software patents are evil

[Anonymous Coward]

The perfect match for MSFT:P I wonder how many more of these it will take for MSFT to get it?

Re:Software patents are evil

[smilindog2000]

Agreed. I thought only the US allowed software patents. What other countries, besides South Korea and the US do this?

Re:Software patents are evil

[Shawn is an Asshole]

Japan is also dumb enough to allow software to be patented.

Re:Software patents are evil

[Don_dumb]

Not only that but the article states

The Korean Court ruled that a patent issued in 1997 to Professor Lee Keung-Hae at Hankuk Aviation University covered any technology that switches user input mode between Korean and English.

Any technology.?The patent doesn't even have to be specific. That is another example of why the patent system with respect of software is broken.

Re:Software patents are evil

[IAmTheDave]

Any technology.?The patent doesn't even have to be specific. That is another example of why the patent system with respect of software is broken.

This isn't even a software issue. if the "any" keyword is indeed in the patent, it could go for anything. Any method of propulsion. Any method of steering. Any method of manufacturing. Any...

This sounds like an overall problem with SK's patent system, and not necessarily one with just the software part.

busted! from TFA, maybe can't sell office

[192939495969798999]

The article says that this could 'prevent Microsoft from selling Microsoft Office in South Korea'... that's how you stop a monopoly: block it from selling a monopoly product. Fines don't really do anything to Microsoft, but anywhere they are prevented from selling even just one piece of their software blanket is a huge blow to their long-term strategy.

Re:busted! from TFA, maybe can't sell office

[LaughingCoder]

that's how you stop a monopoly: block it from selling a monopoly product.

Brilliant! My mother used to refer to this strategy as "cutting off your nose to spite your face". Just imagine back in the days of the railroad barons - all right, nobody can ride trains anymore. Back to horses-and-buggies for you so we can teach that nasty monopoly a lesson they won't soon forget.

Re:busted! from TFA, maybe can't sell office

[SCHecklerX]

Just don't allow *their* cars to run on the rails while letting others.

Re:busted! from TFA, maybe can't sell office

[Anonymous Coward]

so know - when you buy anything from microsoft your hard earned money will be spent on stupid courts but NOT on technological improvements.

Re:busted! from TFA, maybe can't sell office

[Hooya]

> Just imagine back in the days of the railroad barons - all right, nobody can ride trains anymore

well, that analogy is flawed. it implies that if(MS software == railroads && !MS software == automobiles) then { !MS software == (pollution & !efficiency) /* for one */ }

which, as most of know, isn't true. the analogy works only so far as to establish that by snubbing railroads (cutting off your nose...) we're managing quite well with automobiles. which means that we'll manage just fine without MS software.

i have a few korean co-workers and i see them using all kinds of korean software that they claim works better than their rivals (a korean antivirus/spamware removing software comes to mind, tho i don't know the name of it). so maybe, just maybe, they already have software that works better in their market and isn't made by MS. there are others that make software too you know.

i haven't had to use MS software for over 8 years. and i develop software for a living. horses and buggies? if you say so.

Re:busted! from TFA, maybe can't sell office

[JackieBrown]

Well that's not really a change is it?

Re:busted! from TFA, maybe can't sell office

[MaWeiTao]

The article says that this could 'prevent Microsoft from selling Microsoft Office in South Korea'... that's how you stop a monopoly: block it from selling a monopoly product.

Monopoly? You can't be serious. Off the top of my head I can think of at least two competitors to Microsoft office: Lotus Smartsuite and OpenOffice. One is a commercial direct competitor to Office and the other a free, open-source alternative which I myself use. One of the companies where I used to work used Lotus Smartsuite exclusively and abandoned it for Office because they had such a miserable experience with it. I myself used it years ago. It was even more complicated, at the time, than Office. So is it Microsoft's fault that Lotus couldn't produce a sufficiently competitive product?

The last time I checked no version of Windows prevents me from installing any competitor's software nor does Office come installed with Windows.

Just because they have the majority of the market share and because you personally don't like the company doesn't make Microsoft a monopoly.

This situation in Korea to me stinks of the government hindering the competitiveness of a foreign market-leader in order to give domestic companies an unfair advantage.

Re:busted! from TFA, maybe can't sell office

[metamatic]

Monopoly? You can't be serious. Off the top of my head I can think of at least two competitors to Microsoft office: Lotus Smartsuite and OpenOffice.

Now, remembering that one definition of a monopoly is having 90%+ of the market, what's the market share of OpenOffice and SmartSuite?

I'll give you a hint: SmartSuite's market share is less than 2%.

The mere existence of a possible alternative does not stop something from being a monopoly.

Re:busted! from TFA, maybe can't sell office

[LaughingCoder]

... so maybe, just maybe, they already have software that works better in their market and isn't made by MS. there are others that make software too you know.

If this were true then there wouldn't be an issue, right? How would MS sell any software there at all? This smacks of circular logic. Microsoft is a monopoly so we demand lots of cash from them. But maybe we should ban Microsoft from selling since there are many better, cheaper, home-grown products that could be used instead ... if the first statement is true, the second is false, and vice versa.

Re:busted! from TFA, maybe can't sell office

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

Just because they have the majority of the market share and because you personally don't like the company doesn't make Microsoft a monopoly.

IIRC, it does for the purposes of U.S. antitrust law. If I remember correctly from the Slashdot discussions from 1999, you're legally a monopoly if you have a significant influence over prices in the market.

Are you suggesting that Microsoft doesn't substantially influence the pricing of office software?

Re:busted! from TFA, maybe can't sell office

[mjm1231]

There's one little problem with that analogy. If you didn't ride the railroad baron's trains, chances were there literally was no other choice. Can you name one single piece of software that Microsoft sells for which there is no other alternative? Excepting Access (and possibly Excel for certain uses which I am thankfully unfamiliar with), I can't even think of a Microsoft offering that is better than the alternatives. (Note that this does not change the fact that they are a defacto monopoly in many markets.)

Re:busted! from TFA, maybe can't sell office

[stuntpope]

You misunderstand this issue and then apply your "logic". Where is it claimed that this lawsuit was prompted by Microsoft having a monopoly on office software in Korea? It's a patent infringement lawsuit, and would apply equally to Apple had they been the offender. And there are Korean and other Asian office software that compete quite well against MS Office. Hancom Office comes to mind. See http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/tech/200509/kt2005 091220393512350.htm

Re:busted! from TFA, maybe can't sell office

[LaughingCoder]

I did not misunderstand the issue at all. You failed to read the poster's comment that I quoted. You are correct that the main thread was about a patent infringement. However, I was addressing the proposal of "how you deal with monopolies" which was made by the parent-poster to my comment. If you want, feel free to jump on him/her for "not understanding this issue."

BTW, I am glad to hear there are Asian products that compete quite well with Office because competition is healthy and beneficial.

Re:busted! from TFA, maybe can't sell office

[drinkypoo]

Back to horses-and-buggies for you so we can teach that nasty monopoly a lesson they won't soon forget.

The difference is that we're not talking about getting rid of all the trains, just the Microsoft line. Sure, it's the one covering the most ground today, but that's only because it behaved anticompetitively, and this is where the metaphor breaks down because it's a lot easier to deploy software than rail lines.

It's not like we actually need microsoft. This is more like cutting off your nose, and replacing it with a more attractive nose.

Re:busted! from TFA, maybe can't sell office

[tepples]

Can you name one single piece of software that Microsoft sells for which there is no other alternative?

Windows OS and Windows Media Player. What else plays files published by a motion picture studio that believes only in WMV? Or would you stretch so far as to say that one should choose an alternative to Microsoft by choosing an alternative to said motion picture studio?

Re:busted! from TFA, maybe can't sell office

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right, and from your own reasoning of it, that makes Microsoft Office a natural monopoly, by definition.

The mere existance of a monopoly does not make said monopoly bad for people.

Also, there are some very big companies that DO use SmartSuite.

Re:busted! from TFA, maybe can't sell office

[mjm1231]

I'm not aware of any content that is available in this format only. Please enlighten. It must be a real niche item to be available as wmv but not DVD or some other format.

Re:busted! from TFA, maybe can't sell office

[tepples]

It must be a real niche item to be available as wmv but not DVD or some other format.

I don't know of any specific titles yet, but it's likely that a title might get released on DVD in one DVD region but not in another DVD region, but is available on one of the WMV rental services. So if one studio releases in your region only on a format backed by Microsoft (e.g. WMV or HD-DVD), would the existence of other films with the same subject matter constitute a viable alternative to Microsoft products? For instance, would one consider, say, New Line Cinema's The Adventures of Pinocchio (1996) and Walt Disney Pictures' Pinocchio (1940) to be competitors in this sense? What about either of those films vs. Dreamworks' A.I. (2001)?

And what about Microsoft's VFAT patents? Is there a viable alternative to the FAT file system for flash memory cards?

Re:busted! from TFA, maybe can't sell office

[jc42]

I'm not aware of any content that is available in [WMV] format only.

You obviously haven't been looking at much video on the web. There are lots of web sites, including some of the big-name "channels", that provide video clips only in WMV format.

For example, it used to be that comedycentral.com had clips in both WMV and Real formats; some months ago they dropped Real and went with WMV only.

South Korea is isolating itself

[BadAnalogyGuy]

There is so much bad blood between South Korea and the U.S. over the current diplomatic situation with North Korea that it's really no suprise at all that the ultra-nationalistic Koreans have found an American company at fault for anything and everything.

The Roh administration has empaneled the Korean courts with like-minded ideologues who have either made a career of following his pronouncements to the letter or seen their careers evaporate in a swarm of controversy. With South Korea standing alone with North Korea against the rest of Asia and America (the other 4 members of the 6-party talks), the Korean nationalist spirit is once again invigorated.

The Koreans have long turned a blind eye to the faults and foibles of their own countrymen, holding up globally disgraced heroes as leaders. This latest backdoor attack on the "American hegemony" is nothing to be shocked by. On the contrary, if a Korean court were to find against a Korean company in an international dispute, that would certainly be news.

Re:South Korea is isolating itself

[njen]

South Koreans do not blindly support the actions of the leaders in North Korea, they only hope that their countrymen are able to survive the current state of their leaders oppresive control long enough to see freedom. The South Koreans see North Korea as brothers and sisters that will one day find them reunited with each other. Why is it so bad to hope for reunification? Your comments are flamebait as I have never seen any South Korean in support for what the likes of Kim Jong Il has done.

And what if Microsoft did infirnge on patented technology? Then they must pay the price of that infringement.

(no, I am not Korean)

Re:South Korea is isolating itself

[pangloss]

BadAnalogyGuy was so much more charming when he stuck to his forte: bad analogies. The political discourse is akin to McDonald's offering healthy menu items ;)

Anyway, you took an article about a dispute over a software patent and turned it into it's really no suprise at all that the ultra-nationalistic Koreans have found an American company at fault for anything and everything and a backdoor attack on the "American hegemony". Hmm. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Re:South Korea is isolating itself

[Ninjaesque One]

As a Genu-ine South Korean with the Genu-ine South Korean advantage, I'm afraid to say that the South Korean policy on the subject of North Korea has been around for quite a long time. We just found a fault in Microsoft; we still use a hell lot of American products. I recall, for one, that Windows still has a monopoly in the Korean market, as well as IE, in the realm of Microsoft alone. Granted, that sucks in other ways, but it's nothing to blame the current administration about. Recall that our centuries-old nickname is the "Hermit Kingdom"; we just want to live our lives, and have been wanting to live our lives for a dozen centuries.

Re:South Korea is isolating itself

[rograndom]

There is so much bad blood between South Korea and the U.S. over the current diplomatic situation with North Korea that it's really no suprise at all that the ultra-nationalistic Americans have found an Korean court at fault for anything and everything.

The Bush administration has empaneled the American courts with like-minded ideologues who have either made a career of following his pronouncements to the letter or seen their careers evaporate in a swarm of controversy.

The Americans have long turned a blind eye to the faults and foibles of their own countrymen, holding up globally disgraced heroes as leaders. This latest backdoor attack by the "American hegemony" is nothing to be shocked by. On the contrary, if a American court were to find against a American company in an international dispute, that would certainly be news.

Re:South Korea is isolating itself

[burnin1965]

This latest backdoor attack on the "American hegemony" is nothing to be shocked by

I can't say I know much about Korean politics but they seem to be a close ally with the United States even if they don't always see eye to eye with US policies. But to assume that Microsoft's loss in a patent lawsuit is somehow a backdoor attack is ludicrous. If the guy has a patent and Microsoft violated it then they should respect his ip as they claim they do and pay him.

On the other hand this seems more like the sad state of affairs in software patents coming back to bite one of the big software corporations that fail to work in a positive way to fix the system because in most cases it works to their benefit by stamping out competition.

Software patents should be trashed for two reasons, 1) software is covered by copyright not patents, and 2) software patents violate the patent rules because by their nature software patents end up as patents on ideas or abstracts instead of an actual working process and that is why we have people and corporations winning these idiotic software patent lawsuits.

This has less to do with Korean politics and more to do with the ongoing stupidity of software patents.

burnin

Re:South Korea is isolating itself

[Anonymous Coward]

You are full of shlt smuggy boy. North korea has nothing to do with it, that prof secker is just another korean smuggy guy and your precious M$ was just there to be sued. South Korea doesn't care about U.S. nor North Korea, just like you american doesn't care about S.Korea. Who do you think you are anyway? You think you american's are only one who doesn't care about other country? We don't isolate nothing, we just don't care, just like americans. I'm south korean living in the u.s. btw, and I see a lot in common between americans and s.korean especially we both got some smuggers.

Input mode switching

[Taagehornet]

Are they going to ban Java as well?

http://java.sun.com/javase/technologies/core/basic /intl/faq.jsp#imf

Re:Input mode switching

[Anonymous Coward]

From your link:

An application can request an input method that supports a specific locale using the InputContext.selectInputMethod method, but it cannot select a specific input method - that selection is up to the user.

"Cannot." (emphasis mine) Could this be to avoid patent infringement?

No more: 'let them eat cake'?

[postbigbang]

Oh those crazy patents. First Microsoft wants to indemnify those estranged SUSE users, but can't pay a poor Korean prof (are any profs paid well enough?) for his patent.

The double edged sword of patent protection will continue to bite all of us, but in this particular case, there might be a smidgen of justice. Perhaps there's a nice way to treble the damages....

Re:No more: 'let them eat cake'?

[$RANDOMLUSER]

In Korea, only old companies use patents.

Re:No more: 'let them eat cake'?

[postbigbang]

Is there a cultural attitude difference between 'old companies' and new companies regarding patent filings/use/defense?

Re:No more: 'let them eat cake'?

[Elektroschock]

What indemnification? Digital Majority features a nice clarification: Novell-MS patent deal is no defense against bad laws

Old Suse understood that the only solution to solve the softpat mess is lobbying support. Novell gets into dangerous deals which fire heavily back, provided they were not intended to do harm to Linux or Novell's business. I know just another SuSE developer who intents to leave the company.

Re:No more: 'let them eat cake'?

[postbigbang]

We heartily agree. I said it with 'tongue in cheek'. It's my belief that the Novell-Microsoft agreement is a serious sham and travesty, although Novell and Microsoft protest otherwise.

Re:No more: 'let them eat cake'?

[Elektroschock]

Caldera was a nice Linux company... they overtook SCO but then...

Re:No more: 'let them eat cake'?

[stuntpope]

On Slashdot, only random lusers recycle old memes.

The patent itself?

[Archibald Buttle]

It would be nice to have some details of the patent involved here. So far I've seen none.

The summary is also confusing. In one sentence it talks about automatic translation between English and Korean, the next it's about switching the input mode between Korean and English. These would seem to me to be two entirely different things.

As it stands if this really is concerned with switching input modes, then the folks at P&IB may wish to take a look at Apple's Mac OS X too. Since I'm married to a Korean, I've got my Mac at home set up to accept input in English and Hangul (the Korean alphabet). All I need to do to switch between the two is press Apple-Space. Mac OS X is smart enough to remember which alphabet you were typing in inside different windows too.

Re:The patent itself?

[Hooya]

i don't remember what software it was and what context i was using it in but it would switch between devrok and qwerty layouts using the following:

if you typed "asdf", it would switch from qwerty to devrok and
if you typed "aoeu" it would switch from devrok to qwerty.

quite slick. altho i don't see that working for switching languages...

Re:The patent itself?

[ksoonson]

With this patent, if you type Korean in English input mode, it automatically converts those string into Korean and changes the input mode also to Korean.

For example, if you type 'eogksalsrnr' by mistake in English input mode, it automatically converts it into Korean.

Re:The patent itself?

[Archibald Buttle]

Apple's thing will let you switch between Dvorak and Qwerty too in the same way as Qwerty to Hangul. You just need to turn on the Dvorak input method. You can switch between all three if you like, or as many others as you want to add.

Re:The patent itself?

[Archibald Buttle]

Cool - thanks for explaining this.

That would indeed seem to be significantly different from Apple's input method switching.

Whilst when this is explained it seems a pretty obvious thing to do, it is actually a pretty novel idea, and thus if you're allowing software patents this probably get one. MS probably should just cough up the cash for a license on this one.

Re:The patent itself?

[minotaurcomputing]

No wait a second.... my computer does that exact thing for Japanese! Is it easy to now put patents out for a given conversion method for every language possible? Hell, I'm ready to fill my patents for Tswana and Uruk-hai conversion.

Software patents are a joke.
-m

Re:The patent itself?

[hedleyroos]

My major gripe is that this is a seemingly obvious and nice GUI feature. Does it warrant a patent?

Microsoft frequently gets lashed by the Slashdot community and rightly so, but in this case I support them. I'm sure someone thought of this feature years ago but just did not have the resources to put it into their software. If I were Microsoft I'd say screw Korea - we don't need them.

Re:The patent itself?

[jamar0303]

Exactly- for once let there be a country with an MSOffice marketshare of zero. Of course, if the Koreans do just fine without Office that would be a big "#### you" to Microsoft.

Re:The patent itself?

[fbjon]

How do you mean it works for Japanese? Korean input doesn't work the same way.

Re:The patent itself?

[Qzukk]

this is a seemingly obvious and nice GUI feature

It's certainly a nice GUI idea, but the only thing I can think of that might come close to prior art are the "dead keys" on keyboards that are used to type things like accented characters (like C+, or e+` or the like), and those involve you telling the system in advance that you intend for it to read the next few characters and convert them into something else. After that would be the "Input Method" systems that you tell in advance what language you're typing in, type in a transliteration of what you want, and then have the input method convert it to the appropriate representation.

Otherwise, I don't think any English-speaking person would even have thought of having the widget library "remember" the last 10 keypresses or so and comparing them to a dictionary of more than one language to determine while you're typing what language you are typing in, then undoing your keypresses and replacing them with the assumed language.

Re:The patent itself?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a Korean. I have used both homebrew word processor from Korea, and MS office. I think the patent that they are referring to is the feature that I consider very annoying.

Basically, you open up a word processor (either one of those mentioned programs), and start typing Korean with English input on. The program detects it and automatically switch the input to Korean and convert what you have typed. It works the other way too.

It is quite annoying when you want to intentionally misspell words, or you just happen to misspell things and stay with one particular input. The feature is horrible at best.

Re:The patent itself?

[alanoneil]

There are also a few trigger words that will auto-switch to Korean from English, and they are legitimate English words! Personally I think that a few things should _never_ be auto-magically taken over by the computer, and input method is one of them.

Re:The patent itself?

[Tharkban]

unless you've actually thought about this, and it was obvious. Check on both (Well I did qwerty and dvorak...but same idea)...and I'm an average coumputer scientist, so it shouldn't have a patent.

For crying out loud my computer has the following code in the .bashrc .
And the only thing I "stole" was the idea for an alias named asdf and aoeu
Guess I shouldn't go to korea.

asd() {
    xmodmap -e "remove Lock = Caps_Lock"
    xmodmap -e "keycode 66 = BackSpace"
    xset r 66 # set "Backspace" to autorepeat
}

alias u='ls -Fh --color=tty'
alias f='asd ; ls -Fh --color=tty'

Seems pretty obvious to me.

Re:The patent itself?

[lvalue]

I also don't know the specifics but as I'm Korean myself, I think I can guess.

Korean IME behaves in 2 mutually exclusive modes - Korean(Hangul) & English. Usually toggling between those 2 modes is done via an additional key in the keyboard.

Suppose you're typing a document with both Korean and English text in it. Further suppose you just typed a lengthy English text, and forgot to press that Korean-English toggle key before typing in the next Korean word, "여기에서" (which means "here").

When you type in that word in English IME mode, the key sequence becomes "durldptj". On seeing that bizarre word, your word processor thinks, 'Hmm, it doesn't seem like English text at all. Let me see if it makes sense if it were typed in Korean IME mode,' and it does make sense in this case. So it automatically changes IME mode to Korean and change above sequence into Korean word.

This automatic IME mode toggling functionality is widely implemented in Korean word processors, so I guess this case is revolved around it. But it's just a guess^^.

Har Har

[Anonymous Coward]

Those who live by the sword, die by the sword.

Let us all cast out the demonic software patents and return to more tranquil times.

Sounds like home...

[Anonymous Coward]

The Koreans have long turned a blind eye to the faults and foibles of their own countrymen, holding up globally disgraced heroes as leaders.

Wow...I didn't realize they had become so Americanized!

The technology in question may be....

[ihavnoid]

Though I read the article, I could no find any details on the patent. However, the tone of the article seems it is referring to 'automatic input mode switching' method.

Very often, people type Korean while the input mode is in English, and vice versa. What the software does, is that it detects the context of the typing sequence, and figure out whether it needs automatic mode change or not. For example, detecting invalid Korean is simple -- the software simply seeks for invalid typing sequences, since each Korean syllable contains of a sequence of consonant - vowel - consonant (while the last consonant is optional).
Detecting invalid English sequences will be a little bit more difficult, but it seems to be possible using clever techniques combined with large dictionaries.

If the detection algorithm is crappy, typing becomes a nightmare, since it transforms correct English into incorrect Korean typing (or vice versa). However, in these cases, the 'auto-mode-change' can be turned off, or custom words can be added into the dictionary. The two most popular word processing softwares (MS Word and Hangul http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul_(word_processo r)) both has a good implementation.

The wierd thing is that I could not find any source of this news on most major Korean sites.

Annoying

[mattr]

This would be really annoying every time I fell asleep at the keyboard. Of course it would be just like what happens whenever my thumb brushes the touch pad and switches me into Japanese input in linux.. um.

Look this is a software patent and I am not going to read TFA. There are already ways to automatically detect languages by statistical patterns and morphology, one example I know of is for example the nkf unix program, I quote the manpage:

  One of the most unique facicility of nkf is the guess of the
  kanji code. It currently recognizes 7-bit JIS, MS-kanji (shifted-
  JIS),utf-8 and EUC. So users needn't the input kanji code specifica-
  tion.

  Also there are the KAKASI and CHASEN Japanese morphological analyzers. So you can convert English alphabet transliteration to Chinese character based sentences. Also the perl Jcode module does automatic recognition. And people can too, most anyone could differentiate between ASCII representations of Japanese JIS, SJIS, and EUC.

But similar ideas were out there earlier. I am not qualified to evaluate originality of the professor's work in Korean, however analysis of morphology and keyboard input streams is obvious. Also, I think it is more of a trick than an invention, since the example of Korean input someone posted is very unlike English (wierd consonant patterns) which might make it more efficient to guess between the two languages compared to a different language pair. Whatever, I do not see how this guy gets millions of dollars for something that is a neat idea but the neat part of it is just human interface design, something which is not covered by patent and has always been copied and stolen from everyone.

That said, Microsoft asked for it. They want to make software patents a high stakes game, they got it. The problems are that the Korean courts are a time bomb for other OSs, and also that every time Microsoft wins or even loses a big patent battle it just deepens the recognition by society of the validity of those battles. Unless there is more to the tech than what has been mentioned, it does sound like Microsoft was in the right. I have a feeling the courts may just be so pissed at MS that they did this to them. I'd like someone in Korea to ask the guy to release a (L)GPL library!

I for one welcome the Chaos

[bill_kress]

Perhaps it will help put the breaks on globalism and the patent/copyright feeding frenzy. It's obvious that we are going to have legal problems, to not resolve them up-front seems pretty crazy, but since greed got us where we are now, maybe it can get us out too.

Meh, I'm too optimistic.

Agreed

[Anonymous Coward]

I dislike MS but I dislike SW patents even more. Our (US) government simply does not grasp the fact that software patents are patents on ideas, not inventions. If you explain to an ordinary person the nature of a software patent, most people don't believe that our government would allow such patents to exist.

No, the cat does not "got my tongue."

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

patents, haha (tagging beta)

:)

Windows Vista input system locks out hobbyists

[tepples]

The last time I checked no version of Windows prevents me from installing any competitor's software

What you say is true as of November 8, 2006. However, it will not be true as of January 30, 2007. Windows Vista 64-bit Edition will prohibit users from installing drivers for input devices made by entities that have not incorporated and obtained a code signing certificate from VeriSign. This excludes a lot of hobbyists working on assistive technologies for people with disabilities, for which the estimated $100 for incorporation plus $500 for the code signing certificate are cost prohibitive.

"Effective" = "valid"

[rtmyers]

The word "effective" in this post is a mistranslation of the Korean word which should be rendered as "valid".

Go Korea

[i0null]

Go Korea! I'm glad finally that a nation is taking action against a self absorbed monopolizing cooperation! Finally Korea can tell the world how other operating system alternatives improve the efficiency of their organizations. Maybe this way, people will listen.

oops missed the switch to dvorak command

[Tharkban]

should have proofread a little better

the asd function should be
asd() {
    setxkbmap dvorak;
    xmodmap -e "remove Lock = Caps_Lock"
    xmodmap -e "keycode 66 = BackSpace"
    xset r 66 # set "Backspace" to autorepeat
}

and just in case you haven't figured it out. u is an alias for ls (which is annoying to type in dvorak, and f is the character that is output if you're in qwerty and you type a dvorak u (left hand index finger), It's aliased to switch to dvorak and then do an ls.