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Microsoft Getting Paid for Patents in Linux?
kripkenstein noted an Interview with Jeremy Allison where the interviewer asks 'One of the persistent rumors that's going around is that certain large IT customers have already been paying Microsoft for patent licensing to cover their use of Linux, Samba and other free software projects.' and Jeremy responds
"Yes, that's true, actually. I mean I have had people come up to me and essentially off the record admit that they had been threatened by Microsoft and had got patent cross license and had essentially taken out a license for Microsoft patents on the free software that they were using [...] But they're not telling anyone about it. They're completely doing it off the record."
Yes, I know, software patents are the spawn of Satan, no-one (not even me, actually
I'm nowhere near a fanboy for Microsoft (quite the opposite, if you read my posting history), but in this case, I can't see they've done anything *wrong*. You can argue that software patents are bad - yes, agreed. You can argue that these particular patents are flawed, perhaps they are. You can argue that it's just not moral to profit from the work of others, and yes I agree with that too.
But, sadly, what they're doing appears to be legal, so perhaps the ire ought to be directed at what makes it legal, rather than shooting the messenger (dammit
Simon (ducking)
Physicists get Hadrons!
While the idea is plausible and scary, where's the proof? If I were being threatened by Microsoft, I'd sure as hell make it public. What better way to defend yourself than getting support of the entire Linux/Free Software community?
Most home users have been forced to buy XP home anyway.
Summary is linked to the *middle* of the article. This ensures that any /. reader who actually goes to TFA doesn't have to read any of that pesky 'context' or let any of that tiresome 'background' get in their way. Gotta get those First Post!! articles in!
[17] Leary, T., White, C., Wood, P. R., Bhabha, W. D., and Wirth, N. Lambda calculus considered harmful. In Proceedings
No big loss. NFS is easier to use, has real file permissions, etc.
... oh wait ... I get it.
Just another "innovation" from MSFT [smb] that they'll try to horde instead of playing the "let's weigh in on technical merits" game.
And for fuck sake, why doesn't Windows support NFS? It makes mixing boxes on a lan such a bitch
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Write a free cross platform client and server network filesystem which runs on Windows, OSX, Unix, Linux and which uses an open standard for locking, authentication, encryption, ACLs etc.
Leaving file serving in MS's control simply leaves you open to patent infringement etc.
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At least, as far as I'm aware it is. They may have added stuff to the SMB protocol to make it "CIFS", but I thought it was purely a marketing exercise, designed to allow MS to licence it to others.
It wouldn't surprise me to find that Apple had paid a licence fee to MS...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Do they pay Microsoft when you buy a CIFS license for a filer?
Any of these putative companies purchasing a patent license cannot distribute any of the relevant code under the gpl. So maybe that's why they are keeping quiet, or maybe they are not re-distributing any software. If the former, then Jeremy Allison has a moral and legal duty to "out" those companies.
It is time to delete the patent system, then we delete Microsoft too.
That's been my thought for a while. It would be a big job, of course, but one that would give a true alternative to Microsoft.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
How exactly is MS breaching the GPL? Also, the GPL is a copyright license, not a contract, so you cannot sue for "breach of GPL". What you can so them for is copyright violation, if they are distributing your stuff in a way that you haven't given them a license for.
You know, Microsoft's street address also says a lot about their mentality.
Well, that was the idea with CIFS. Microsoft embraced it, and then extended it to become SMB.
This smells like FUD.
Would like to discuss your annual donation...
Rocco and Knuckles will be by to pick up the envelope.
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
Every time I think of Microsoft and the harm they are causing the end user, and the consumer, it just irritates me beyond belief. Nothing they do benefits the consumer, NOTHING. And yet, the government applauds them for their fine efforts at being completely monopolistic in our modern day capitalistic society.
Makes me want to puke.
Relocating to San Francisco / Palo Alto... Hire me?
Do publicly traded companies have to report this kind of thing? I would be quite concerned if a company whose stock I own was paying money under the table to organizations that had been found guilty of criminal acts. Does anybody have an idea of what companies are doing this, so that they can be asked in a stockholders' meeting.
Maybe we should patent patenting stuff, and than we could sue people who patent something?
Menzoberranzan Networks
Write a free cross platform client and server network filesystem which runs on Windows, OSX, Unix, Linux and whi...
And how do you hook that into Windows such that the Kernel can efficiently make access control decisions and everything else it needs to do?
I heard the illuminadi made them pay Microsoft because these companies know about the Venus base! NOBODY IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW ABOUT THE VENUS BASE! Anyway, the aliens in the Venus base don't use Windows because they know the French government has installed electron bugs in it which can enter your brain and make you like blueberry bagels, and really, who wants that?
Comment of the year
Thing is, that's the problem. It seems that MS are essentially blackmailing people who use "their" technology in Samba. What they've done is destroy any trust that the SMB and CIFS technology can be used without being sued into oblivion...
With an independently controlled and standard network file system that wouldn't be the case.
Deleted
The patent holders will be first against the wall when revolution comes!
Slashdot: where posts using the "f-word" and threatening mass murder get modded "Insightful."
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
But, sadly, what they're doing appears to be legal, so perhaps the ire ought to be directed at what makes it legal, rather than shooting the messenger (dammit :-).
In this case, the messenger is also the guilty party. M$ is one of the largest proponents of software patents and other bogus "IP" laws.
The reason you should be outraged is that they now own your code. Without any further effort than paying off a bunch of lawmakers and lawyers, they have secured an income on .... everything. They also grant themselves the power to shut down projects they don't like. Make no mistake, a little control for M$ is total control when it gets in the way of your software freedoms. Long after Vista bombs in the market place, M$ will be profiting from your work and using it to cause you further harm in any way they please.
This is why anti-patent language in GPL 3 is so important and why everyone should support it. The true cost of supporting M$ though judicial extortion will only be revealed if we hang together. The internet itself would not function without GPL'd code. Laws will change if suddenly that code is unavailable.
I'm nowhere near a fanboy for Microsoft (quite the opposite, if you read my posting history)
I will do exactly that. See you in half an hour or so.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
You can only use it in a remotely secure fashion when you have complete control of both the client and server. i.e. only within the datacenter, if a client is out on the shop floor, it's insecure.
SMB it seems may be patent encumbered, which leaves the rather unpalatable alternative that there is a need for a ground up free, open standard network filesystem which can be implemented on all platforms.
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And up to this point what has covered EULA such as the GPL?
Contract law.
Does this mean that a "license" is a contract? Case law seems to indicate yes.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I have yet to hear of any evidence, *ever* in the history of computing, where software patents were anything more than the proverbial Turd In The Swimming Pool(tm). You CAN'T polish a turd! Plate it with gold and voila -- it's STILL a turd!
As Floaters ensure that only the most discusting little kids ever use the swimming pool, Software Patents ensure that only the biggest, most amoral lawyer infested companies thrive in the tech industry.
You are where you are at the time you are there.
The process is clearly not exhaustive, because of the amount of prior art that is typically missed. Perhaps you meant exhausting. But even so, that doesn't mean it was meritorious or worthwhile (you could waste a lifetime of work making a marshmallow car. If no-one wants marshmallow cars, you've just wasted your life) - in this case you're telling someone to do work on satisifying the patent monopoly bureaucracy in a purely artificial system*. The work effort would be better spent on developing something cool (the fact you say "find something to patent" shows how low the USA has sunk - mere discoveries("finds") aren't supposed to be patentable in the first place), profitting, and pumping some of the profit back into the campaign to abolish the patent monopoly system (which ultimately needs to go the way the institution of slavery went).
*In fact, it's now been shown that that patenting work activity SUBSTITUTES for research activity, at least in the software field. That is to say, the patent system isn't just not encouraging innovation and progress, it's actually actively discouraging it. Brilliant.
You have no ambition, do you?
There are over 36 million lines of COBOL code in the world, and they are all raping children.
But, sadly, what they're doing appears to be legal,
With this off the record business, I wonder if they are claiming it on taxes? Both on the giving and recieveing end of the "patent extortion". Basically just how under the table is this?
We are all just people.
Deleted
...is that MICRO$OFT extends things which are not considered "prior art"; yet, if you want to extend M$' things, you're in for serious "legal" threats.
Corporate bullying should never be tolerated in a mature nation. Also, corporation profit compromising as a motive for prosecution tells a lot about (lack of) respect for humans.
IBM, SUN and RH may decide to make their software patent money now by extorting it from Microsoft shops at 10x the cost of Windows licenses. They could make a tidy sum and lay the groundwork for abolishing software patents in the public interest.
I regret to inform you that the firm which I represent has acquired a patent on "the desire of shooting people in the motherfucking head" technology, which you've included in your most recent post to Slash Dot.
The licensing fee for this technology is $100, however the penalty fee for utilizing the technology without first having acquired a license is $900, so we will be collecting $1,000 from you post haste.
RTFGPL, dude. GPL is NOT an EULA. It's a distribution license.
From the GPL Section 0
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
As of yet there is no proof they are doing this. " off the record, anonymous contacts" mean nothing.
Now, if its proven to be happening, then ya. its time to get pissed off. ( though, no one can say this wasnt unexpected )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
You guys totally missed the point of the article. It was about the burrito command.
Mmm, burrito.
I do agree with you 100%, however, Microsoft did say on the record they wouldnt pull this exact stunt.. So yes, we can bitch at them for going back on their word, if its true.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Now we can see that Microsoft's deal with Novell was explicitly designed to create and solidify this impression amongst companies using Linux. Novell were well and truly bent over the table, despite the fact that they so innocently claim that they have not admitted any IP issues with Linux or the software they use.
I'm getting older and I'm tired. OS Wars / Browser Wars / These are getting as bad as the regional conflicts in the world that have been going on for centuries. I need a new OS that will Rock my World, Will free the slaves to
Posted while sitting here, waiting patiently for WinFS or Hell to freeze over, which ever comes first.
Have gnu, will travel.
-- jchenx
Long ago and far away, before there was OSX, when sysadmins needed to connect Macs to Windows shares, there was... DAVE. :)
Dave does WINS.
+++ATH0
It shows that nobody is capable of comming up with an original idea anymore, not that the patent system discourages innovation.
Think about it, if it infringes on a patent, aka somthing that's been thought of before, how can it be innovative ?
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
... you can as well hand over your company to Microsoft and do something else. Like flipping burgers.
If you think the shares of a company going open about something like this would tank, I would like to see what would be the result for MS shares (whose price had remained pretty flat for some time now).
I think this article is baseless, but it is nice weekend speculation, conspiracy theories and all that.
But then again, if somebody would have described SCO's actions before they started their disgraceful charade, few would have believed it.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Wouldn't you think that IBM, HP, and other large Linux server sellers would be a little annoyed at Microsoft shaking down their customers? The more their customers get shaken down, the less like IBM and all would get repeat business, right?
I would think that IBM could charge Microsoft with Racketeering (which is essentially what MS is doing) on behalf of their Linux customers.
Maybe the average corporation doesn't have the clout to stand up to Microsoft, but IBM does.
(Note: I'm not really a big IBM fan. I'm just pointing out that Microsoft isn't infallible).
This space left intentionally blank.
I would say that the Internet would run perfectly fine without GPL'd software because the code that runs the 'net is BSD, not GPL.
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
This includes measures like:
-Not allowing users to change uid (or using mechanisms to make sure they do it only to a handful of them)
-Removing all external media from personal computers. Clog the USB ports. No laptops on the network (laptops go to a firewalled network considered hostile).
-Having restriction lists of machines allowed to mount filesystems remotely.
-Constantly generating reports of who is mounting what and when.
-And so on and so forth.
Security is a way of life, not a protocol. NFS may be shite, but many other things are shite in WIndows (most of them actually) security wise. So you should secure your networks as much as possible irrespective of the technologies you are using.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
*I* won't be advocating any sort of violence but if MS is engaged in patent extortion then I'm VERY angry about it. This means MS sees me as someone to shake down rather than to make a customer. Right now, I merely dislike MS and their products. If my workplace were ever shaken down in this manner I would be an implacable enemy. If I MUST buy certain technologies then I will make a point of buying them from MS' competitors. Any FOSS solutions they don't put a shadow over will be used in preference even if MS' items are in any way "the right tool for the job".
Do you hear that Mr. Chairman? This sort of behavior doesn't make an willing customer of me. If I have anything to say about it, you won't make an unwilling customer of me either. Either make something I want to buy or hurry up and die. In no case will I be forced to enrich you further.
I'm really no expert on this, so can someone explain why ftp doesn't fill these requirements?
"The use-mention distinction" is not "enforced here."
There is a huge problem with this.
'Write a free cross platform client and server network filesystem which runs on...'
Here is the catch.
'...OSX'
Only Apple can make OSX natively support your new standard. They probably will since it is an open standard.
'...Unix'
Unix is modular and you could plug in your solution even if vendors didn't ship it. You probably wouldn't have much trouble getting vendors to include an implementation of your protocol since it only benefits them to do so.
'...Linux'
Duh
'...Windows'
And here is the show stopper. Only Microsoft can integrate native support for your protocol in windows. Further Microsoft has complete control of the API's that would be required to hook support into windows after installation and can change them at will and break your solution's installed base.
Since Microsoft is a monopoly they don't have to play ball and interoperate with you. For the same reason, in order to have a chance of success you must interoperate with them.
Patents are logically justified on the position that it is impossible to run out of ideas. If there are 'no more new ideas' then patents have destroyed one of their few justifying principles.
In this case, blaming Microsoft for this (assuming the claims are real) is not shooting the messenger.
Microsoft refuses to reveal which code is infringing so that it could either be rewritten or (more likely) have the patent struck down due to prior art.
They're basically saying "You did something wrong but I'm not telling you what you did and you have to make up for it or else.". This is just plain extortion and should be dealt with as such.
As the old saying goes, when messenger is the message it's okay to shoot the messenger.
That can also be read as "Slick way to copy an idea".
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
And how does that BSD code get compiled? Sun's C compiler? The mysterious BSD C compiler that doesn't exist?
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
If you have an AFS client, take a look in /afs. It contains a lot more than just universities (I know you said at the very least). And there are those that do not list their sites in the public AFS directory, so the number of sites that use it is actually larger.
But, sadly, what they're doing appears to be legal, so perhaps the ire ought to be directed at what makes it legal, rather than shooting the messenger (dammit :-).
It may be legal, but it's still wrong. It's particularly wrong because of Microsoft's history of monopolistic practices and the fact that many of their patents would probably not stand a test in court, but Microsoft is apparently using contracts and pressure to keep those patents from getting tested in court.
Therefore, our ire is, in fact, properly directed at Microsoft.
I would not doubt that Microsoft would try to extort its own customers in a SCO-like shake down. I'm pretty sure they paid SCO to do it as a sort of trial balloon. An insignificant piss ant like SCO first attacks giant like IBM, drags the litigation out for years and then Microsoft comes in: "See what SCO is doing to IBM? Nice little company you have here... Be a shame if Microsoft had to destroy it through litigation..."
I also don't doubt that some businesses may have capitulated. That does not, however, give any validity to their patent claims.
As an IT community we need to respond to Microsoft's aggression in several ways.
First we must start screaming for the justice department to once again prosecute them for their continued anti-trust violations. They must be held accountable for the damage they are doing through leveraging their monopolies. We must insist that they be broken apart into at least three and probably four separate companies.
Second, we must not cooperate with Microsoft in any way. Any "gifts" that they offer always turn out to have strings attached. Do not support any part of their dot-net strategy. I use "dot-net" in a loose way to cover many different things like their libraries, ASP.NET etc. The Mono project should die. Don't support it, don't use it.
Third, we should work to make Java, PHP, etc the defacto standards in delivering active server pages.
We all need to work together to make Microsoft irrelevant. It won't be quick, it won't be easy but it must be done. This company has shown again and again and again that it is not interested in coexistence.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
It is much cheaper to invest in lobbying against software patenting. Europe tells a lesson here. It is just a matter of ressources. Support the anti-softpatent movement.
NFS was designed for use in an environment where both client and server boxes were secure, multi-user systems.
That's what it was designed for, but such an environment never really existed, even in the most draconian, centrally managed environments. Even if it had, NFS still had gotten identity management completely wrong and had numerous other problems. NFS was just a lousy design.
SMB was designed on the assumption that the client would be an insecure single-user system. All the security is on the server, and connections are on a per-user basis.
That's a lot closer to how NFS has been used in the real world. We'd all be better off if an SMB-like system, not NFS, had become the UNIX standard.
Well geez, if we're going to stupid extremes, how did the first cut of GCC get compiled?
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
I've been looking at the existing alternatives,
NFS: Not appropriate outside the data center/on windows because of security model.
Coda: No native Windows client. Looks like development stalled a couple of years ago. No XP/Vista.
Intermezzo: No Windows client.
Lustre: No Windows client.
OpenAFS: Windows client, including Vista, 64bit, OSX free... But the Windows AFS server code is experimental
Yeah, OpenAFS is the closest existing an open network file system. However it's decidedly non trivial to install and configure, both on the client and server. It's really unsuitable for small sites, even for medium sized sites it's overkill. What's needed is Install -> Add shares/files -> add user accounts allowed.
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When interviewed they refused to say which patents Linux infringes. This is pure fraud by Microsoft. Burn them alive.
Probably with the Sun C compiler. Why?
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Yes, and the keyword there is suddenly. If the code is slowly, quietly and profitably (to the right folks) swapped out, it will happen.
And that's why we've got to raise a ruckus.
If you patent a mechanical device and someone infringes on your patent to sell me a knockoff, you can sue them and make them stop selling it, but you can't sue me and make me stop using the one that I bought.
Something like this happened years ago. Kodak came out with an instamatic camera, one that ejected the photo paper when a picture was taken then slowly develops. Polaroid had a patent on this and sued Kodak, Kodak lost and was required to either issue a refund for those who bought the camera or exchange the camera for a Polaroid camera. The only reason to keep the camera was as a collector's item, they wouldn't be able to use it because Kodak could not sell the photo paper and the camera was incompatible with Polaroid's paper. Something similar probably would happen here with software. While a user might decide to keep it they very well may find they can't get support for it, at least not legally.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Well said. But what is even more effective: support those who fight against software patenting. The GPLv3 is just a tool to trigger the debate. It is software engineers which need to kick the layers out.
Microsoft is at its heart a parasitic entity, whose only purpose is to maximize its profits, which means maximizing income with the minimum amount of effort. Already we see that real software innovation has moved elsewhere. For example, if it weren't from external pressure from open source software like Mozilla, Microsoft would have stopped development on IE completely. An even better model for them would be simply to have others do the development at no cost to Microsoft, and then for them to charge users for the use of this software, via software patents, etc.
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
i can't see how they could hold a valid patent on smb when it was developed at IBM, prior art people. this sounds a lot like extortion money to me - pay us or we will open our obvious patent's war chest on you.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
M$ can't bully Uncle Sam. If they are extorting companies, I'm sure that their legal counsel is secretly complaining to the DOJ.
Oh but MS has bullied, er bought off, the government. The Clinton admin's Department of Justice had MS on the ropes. Then comes along the Bush admin and they let MS off without even a slap on the wrist. What puzzles me about this is that Texas was one of the first state governments to file a lawsuit against MS and they filed while Bush was governor of Texas.
FalconShould there be a Law?
In some network neighborhoods, that may work for
a while. Over time, if GPL is not available,
eventually BSD will be subverted because of microtaxes.
GPL actually helps keep BSD freer than otherwise.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Microsoft are probably offering their bigger corporate customers the chance to buy a patent licence so that they can continue to use Samba while Microsoft attempt to sue the pants off whoever wrote samba.
The reason they're doing this is because from watching SCO, Microsoft fully expect to be able to drag the litigation out for years, during the early round of which they will get a restraining order on the samba developers hence no upgrades. They will then release some windows update "security patch" to Exchange that just concidentally happens to make the current Samba incomaptable.
The only people that will then get Samba upgrades legally will be those licenced to Microsoft. It may even be Microsoft themselves that release the fixes in a fake show of support for Opensource to placate the EU.
OTOH, publicly traded companies are required to list all liabilities including those from law suits or potential law suits. If they are hushing it up, they may be violating exchange rules or SEC regs.
Which is why MS is able to get away with bullying. A business may pay MS to make lawsuits "go away", once they pay MS the possibility of a lawsuit filed against them by MS goes away. It's when they don't buckle under that they have to report the possibility of a lawsuit filed by MS.
FalconShould there be a Law?
From that link:
If you went to so much trouble trying to "expose" this person as a member of your mythic "MS Astroturfer" brigade that "preys" on Slashdot, maybe you can also enlighten us as to what in that post you find so insulting?Even the guys saying this stuff wouldn't think twice about having a beer with you.
Would it be a free beer?
*Dodges chairs and shots in the head*
Jenny's got a new number! 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
...society just needs to revolt against the "company store" mindset. Corporations are not ever supposed to have gotten so important as to be so thoroughly entrenched into society that they become an obnoxious threat.
It is way past the time with that despicable company. There are a few out there that are the epitome of sleaze and greed, enron, exxon, haliburton/kbr, the media companies represented by the MAFIAA price fixing cartel come to mind.
And Microsoft.
I applaud the foreign nations who are actively resisting and moving away from them as much as possible. Regrettably, I know the USA will be the last to see the light on how they are dragging down and ruining the computer scene, they are well past any sort of usefulness for society. All they represent now is economic inertia and "the big skim".
For the past several years now I have expected nothing from them other than severely restrictive, over priced buggy bloatware, being pushed in the sleaziest manner possible-and I certainly haven't been disappointed in the least, they nail it every chance they get. And what is worse-you can't "vote with your wallet". You as an individual can decide to not use their stuff, but that doesn't stop some piece of all your tax money and some piece of the cost of everything you buy winding its way back into their already stuffed to the seams bursting wallets.
That is a clear sign when some corporation has just gotten too large and too intrusive and too greedy and too powerful, when you can't even avoid them when you want to.
The original icon with bill the borg was just so right-on. In fact, it's worse, imagine a corporate society that took the worst they could find from ferengi society and the borg and combined them, that's MS.
The only people I feel sorry for are the ones stuck working there in this economy, because they need a job that can pay the bills. I know there has to be a lot of folks there who know full well that "things are just not right", but are stuck for a handy alternative.
Perhaps those folks and any non-greed filled stockholders can turn that company around back to being useful and ethically straight-not just "profitable", I mean ethically straight. No one really minds honest decent companies, and no one really minds if someone makes a buck, but people do mind and do notice once companies have gone off the deep end into uncontrolled spasms of pure greed.
Yes, Balmer, someone does need to "take the food off your plate", you and your slobbering yes-men are overstuffed bullies and just plain rude and obnoxious in my opinion.
Put the damn fork down and push away from the table, haven't you gorged enough? Is society now supposed to fund your computing vomitorium so you can keep eating at the economic trough well past any semblance of normalcy and decency? Did you ever stop to think that yes, it IS possible to be civil in our civilization?
No - I don't think so. Preaching to the converted who already use the licence is not going to have any effect at all on the US Patent office or your elected officials. The way to resolve the broken patent or copyright system of a country is to appeal to the goverment of the country - not just complain to people that are already on your side. If government corruption makes it harder to get heard without money that means working hard and using other means to get heard like talking to as many elected officials as possible - but they won't be reading the GPL so that won't help.
Of course they want to keep it quiet. Because unlike any other company, if MS were to be exposed at doing such a thing, they'd be buried under anti-trust lawsuits.
I hope it any of that story is true, that one of the people who are being threatened will draw a line in the sand, and blow the whole thing open.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
No, patents are logically justified on the position that the person who devised the object or idea being patented should be rewarded for their insight and effort. Removing patents effectively removes a major incentive for coming up with workable objects or ideas, or at least dissuades the inventor from making the invention available to the public.
If Microsoft couldn't patent, say, the intellectual capital in it's latest tools, so that all and sundtry could copy them without any paying back to the inventor, why on earth would Microsoft bother to invent new tools and processes? Same goes for any intellectual capital (patent or copyright), especially in the transient worlds of software, music, film, and print.
Will those of you who think that you know what you are doing, get out of the way of those of us who know what we are doi
- A lot of Free Software uses GCC extensions.
- GCC supports more architectures.
- GCC supports things like C++, Objective-C, ADA, FORTRAN, etc. If you're going to install GCC for non-C languages, you may as well use it for C too.
It is, however, possible to build a BSD system without GCC. It's just not necessarily sensible...I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I know of TenDRA and the 4.3BSD-Reno pcc, what's the other one?
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
After the burst of rage i felt after reading that story summary i feel it was a pretty moderate response
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
Reports of a hostage-taking in Redmond, Washington say that an unidentified man has taken several Microsoft employees hostage and has issued demands for bug fixes as well as the return of Clippy.
"I want system-modal Ok-Cancel dialogs to stop being buried under other dialogs," said the statement released by the man. "I want spyware completely removed from my computer and I want my registry to be less fragile."
"But most of all, I want Clippy back in MS Office. Clippy would have helped me write a better list of hostage-taker's demands."
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Wow. Your post shows a lot of ignorance. OS X has a kernel API for implementing new filesystems which is similar to BSDs although using opaque structures with accessor "methods" rather than direct access to structure data. It was apparently good enough for Amit Singh to implement FUSE on top of which now allows any Linux FS that can run under FUSE to be readily ported.
UNIX of course depends on what variant but at the very worst they all have some sort of NFS client so you could theoretically run a localhost-only NFS server to expose your filesystem to the kernel. Some UNIX and UNIX-clones like linux are open source so anything can be done.
And finally, we come to Windows. I know for a FACT that Windows has supported pluggable network filesystems for a long time now. What do you think Novell Client32 is? Sure, it's a GINA replacement for login but it also is a "filesystem redirector". It makes \\SERVERNAME\SHARENAME\... try the NetWare File Protocol on SERVERNAME before deferring to MS's CIFS.
And as others have mentioned, there is OpenAFS which does something similar.
I think the real problem is that most developers would rather deal with Windows remotely. Writing a CIFS server using your favorite development platform (generally some type of UNIX) is a lot nicer than writing a network redirector for several versions of windows. These days though it's probably easier because almost everything now is of the NT lineage so one versioni with maybe a few conditionals should be sufficient.
Still, it's worth pointing out that Novell has dropped support for NT4 and doesn't yet support Vista. Samba works with all of them.
This article, along with the other I just read quoting Bill Gates as claiming that "security experts" are producing Mac exploits "every day" that "totally take over your [Mac] machine" (I mean, WTF!), clearly demonstrates both that Bill Gates is a deliberate LIAR (as I have reiterated on Slashdot for years) and that Microsoft is a CORRUPT, ILLEGAL pseudo-monopoly and EXTORTION RACKET that needs to be put out of business NOW by any means necessary.
Microsoft and its management make Enron look like Greenpeace and Consumer Reports combined.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Mod parent insightful, i'm out of points and this is (up to here) the post which shows the most knowledge and understanding of patents.
Of course, patenting something is exhausting for an individual. It's very cheap and easy for a big company though. And even if it was expensive and exhausting even for companies, that still doesn't make the patenting system less flawed.
SSHFS and other SSH-based file exchange systems (like the SFTP plugin that most modern desktops like KDE and GNOME have) are very good for the single-user clients.
/home dir with SMB. Either all users will have the same access and could access each-others data (because the /home directory is entirely accessed with 1 single username:password), or you'll have to mount each subdir inside /home individually (each one accessing its corresponding resource with the right of the user owning the home-dir)
/home directory. When a given user wants to access some files on the share, the client transmits the username to the server and the user has only some restricted rights on the files. User can't peek at each others files, even if they all access the same mount-point, because their not accessing it with mount-point-wide access credential.
Where they fail and NFS is the only one close to a solution, is in the case of a multi-user clients.
With SMB/CIFS, SSHFS/SFTP, etc... when several users on a client machine want to access a resource, each one has to mount/connect to it separately, so each individual mount/connection is accessing the resource using different access right (each user connects with it own username:password, and each one has a different set of access and sees the same resource differently in his own mount-point).
You *CAN'T* mount a
With NFS you export a whole tree, and the server trusts the client. Access on the resource are done with the rights given to the user on the client. The client *have* to be trusted and to transmit correct usernames.
With this scenario, you can mount the
The problem is when the client *CAN'T* be trusted : for a home lan everything is OK, but for a whole corporation, there's a risk that someone plugs-in a rogue laptop, fires up an NFS client, pretends to be someone else, and access data on a resource using this false identity.
That's why NFSv4 is being developed, and that's why we need some good alternative to SMB/CIFS, even if the casual user who only uses SFTP/SMB doesn't grasp this subtlety.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Ok, you work in games feel like an innocent bystander and would rather not be shot. That's nice, I really doubt anyone actually wants to shoot you. I certainly don't But, why is it not personal when MS steals other's work, ruins lives and destroys companies illegally, causes a huge drain in the economy and simultaneously slows technological innovation, making life worse for everyone. How is it "not personal, that is "not an emotional issue" when an organization for its own profit makes someones life worse, yet it is madness for the people affected to be angry? But when there are actual people at MS doing actual bad things and we should actually be angry at them. I think we should not shoot them, but maybe they should be compelled to do useful work for no more than reasonable gain? How can anyone think it rational to claim that a legal fiction can own an idea?
And you'll come out and say this openly (not behind the AC tag) when?????
The holes in your argument are astounding. Patents and IC laws have absolutely nothing to do with "corporate control freaks in the USA", and everything to do with healthy competition. You suggest, break down all the barriers, let anyone use any design, any idea, without payment! OK, then, let's see your earth shattering design that has been your life's work, and that you're willing to put out there for everyone to benefit from, for free.
It's usually the people who know nothing, think nothing, and will never, ever add to the store of man's knowledge who are all in favour of "opening up" the intellectual capital of the world (and everything else - cheaper petrol, electrical power is my right, water shouldn't cost, medicine should be free, etc, etc) for their own exploitation, and you, my friend, sound as though you fit right into that category.
I'm sorry, but I can't accept the absolutely piratical attitude that comes out sounding so self righteous and pious in posts like this. The world obviously owes you a living, and you would have no hesitiation to take without returning, as long as you can get away with it.
Will those of you who think that you know what you are doing, get out of the way of those of us who know what we are doi
I think you, sir, are the troll. Could you throw FUD or accusations of murder or attempted murder after the fact in the direction of FSF or Linux Users? By doing it now, you are claiming us of a zealotry (no, internet posts don't count, especially when someone releases steam) that has not surfaced yet when it has been shown time and again that MS is the lawbreaker and predator. Not us.
Thank you.
It's called AFS, and has quite good open implementations and Kerberos integration. Getting it installed by default on Windows clients is a huge burden, however.
Because it costs money. Do you think MS will be the only company lining up for cash if there is cash to be taken? It will only be the first and not the last, as the rest of the vultures (think big companies and small companies like SCO) flock in to take what they can. And then free software won't be free.
Right now, MS won't dare touch patents in linux, because like the cold war, it will be Mutual Assured Destruction. IBM and some other Linux defenders/MS enemies backs up linux and gives it a hefty patent portfolio with which to threaten MS with. It is a no-win situation.
Companies who pay are suckers and won't reap the promised savings, so why even move from MS?
Paying the mafia in this case is foolish. You are helping them when you don't have to and weakening your own cause. (And being mad at what makes it possible won't do a damn thing. Take the money and instead of putting it in MS's pocket, stick it in a PAC that tries to change the rules in your favor.) Just because something is legal doesn't make it right.
Look shithead. You are the one who chose to go to work for the mafia, take some fucking responsibility for yourslef and quit blaming other people for holding you responsible for your actions.
In short, eat shit and I dearly hope that you do get gunned down. You made your choices and that would be a positive result of such a sleazy immoral choice. If you honestly have a problem with this, the solution is easy. Get a job at a non criminal company.
Oh, right, another big brave AC, I see.
I would brand this juvenile, only it isn't
It's peurile, yes, but on the "sicko" side rather than just the wandering ravings of a pre-teen dickhead with aspirations to be Batman or similar.
Grow up, kiddy. Microsoft isn't a single corporation, and the people who i have had contact with in the Games area are as decent a set of people as you would find anywhere, unlike yourself.
No, I don't work for Microsoft, have never worked for Microsoft, and never will work for Microsoft, but I can at least respect the personal integrity of the vast majority of the people working for them.
They don't deserve this crap, even for a pre-pube twat like you.
Will those of you who think that you know what you are doing, get out of the way of those of us who know what we are doi
Perhaps, but behind the scenes, SCO is paying me $666 per license for my intellectual property.
Please allow me to introduce myself...
Is there a patent issue between MS and Linux? From what I have read the problem is with Samba and MS, not Linux. If I uninstall Samba from my servers I'm fine, right??
A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it. -- Einstein
I am not the AC who said that. I do however agree that:
it's time to abolish the patent system worldwide.
You speak of healthy competition? There's nothing healthy about the way the likes of the RIAA and MS compete. They play the game dirty. They have managed to subvert a system designed to protect the little inventor from greedy cheating soulless corporate beasts, and now in cruel irony use it to bar entry to and squash competition and stifle innovation from the very people the patent system was supposed to help and encourage. And it hurts everyone. Not healthy, not healthy at all.
You demand that those of us who support if not the abolishment of Intellectual Property at the very least heavy reform, put our ideas out there for anyone to freely use? Why? To prove that we aren't a bunch of hypocrites? You think by this dare to make us realize that we're just like you? That we won't do it? Well, you've already lost that one. Though you are not worthy, some among us have made our work available to all, even you, with FreeBSD licensing. And some, lead by Richard M. Stallman, have made our work available with the GPL, which states in essence that you may not steal it. And by steal I do not mean copy, I mean make a trivial change, then take credit for it, and copyright it under your own name as if it were entirely your own work, and then deny its use to all who do not pay you extortionate fees. A lot of people, including, yes, myself, have made work available. So much for your assertion that it's only consumers and users who "will never, ever add to the store of man's knowledge" being the only ones screaming for IP relief. What are you going to do to demonstrate that you aren't hypocritical scum? Or are you just going to laugh at us for being, as you see it, "idiots" for giving our work away for, as you see it, "nothing"? In that case, you just don't get it.
It's those like you and MS who take without returning. The world doesn't owe us a thing, and we didn't say that it did. Stop putting those words in our mouths. But if you believe in Intellectual Property because you believe authors and inventors should be rewarded, then why do you sneer at us for those words "the world owes us a living" that we didn't say but which you put in our mouths? By your support for IP, you imply that the world does indeed owe something to inventors and artists.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Still anonymous, od course. And who gave YOU the right to determine who "fits" in/. and who doesn't? Freedom of speech OK as long as everyone agrees with everything you want them to say, but not when someone disagrees with you? Nice person!
You think that the Linux etc "model" is the only one that should apply? Let's see you develop, in a group, a cure for one of the cancers, or an answer to the atmospheric carbon dioxide problem. Not a chance! And remove the ability of whoever invents it to recoup their costs, as well! You selfish turd!
And no, I haven't patented anything, and am unlikely ever to patent anything, but I do agree that you get what you pay for, and that is a major reason why I, and many others, have stayed away from Linux in droves. If the model worked, everyone would be using it. But they don't, and they won't, because it's basically badly flawed. Same goes of oOo, and your beloved Wikipedia.
Will those of you who think that you know what you are doing, get out of the way of those of us who know what we are doi
Will the real Linux owner please stand up?
What?
What do you expect on /.? Mature conversation? Level-headed debate?
You're in the wrong place...
Where is the Undo button for my life? Not to mention the Esc key.
The RIAA has about as much to do with the proper use of copyright as a pork sausage has to do with Jewry. The RIAA is a knee jerk reaction by a group of people who never actually invented / developed / wrote anything, are stealing the original authors inventors of just about everything ,and don't want to see their little monopoly destroyed by people pirating "their" wares. They have nothing whatsoever to do with where I am coming from in this. I don't pirate music, video or film, but I don't condone RIAA, either.
IBM, MS, SUN (and yes, even SCO - sometime back in the dim, dark ages), along with Warner Brothers, Sony, Apple Merck, Ford, GM and many other organizations own works that they have paid for the development of, and have furnished the environment, the facilities and the people to develop. Remove the protection of copyright and patent, and they have absolutely no reason to continue to develop products and ideas - they will sit back and wait for someone else to develop it, so that they can take it and use it for their own purposes.
Currently, Linux is actually protected by the same conventions that protect IBM and MS. Take them away, and you'll see the likes of MS and IBM actively marketing Linux for their own profit, and under your vision of the patentless model of the future, they would be fully entitled to do so. You want that?
Why? To prove that we aren't a bunch of hypocrites?YES!
And by steal I do not mean copy, I mean make a trivial change, then take credit for it, and copyright it under your own name as if it were entirely your own work, and then deny its use to all who do not pay you extortionate feesAnd as I pointed out above, that is EXACTLY where you are heading if you do away with patent and copyright laws. Instead of weakening them, you should be arguing for strengthening them, to remove the ability of the likes of the hackers of this world to subvert copyright because they are too cheap to actually pay for what they consume.
Stop putting those words in our mouths.Sounds awfully like the pot calling the kettle black, to me. Microsoft et al are tried, convicted and executed on the basis of an article on the web "attributed" to anonymous persons, and you talk about people putting words into people's mouths!
BTW, I also have produced my fair share of freeware, downloadable by anyone who would like to do so, but I don't think of that as anything other than a hobby, and not something that I would for an instant want to prevent anyone from taking, modifying and reposting. It would be no skin off my nose if they did.
Will those of you who think that you know what you are doing, get out of the way of those of us who know what we are doi
Isn't it past your bed time?
Will those of you who think that you know what you are doing, get out of the way of those of us who know what we are doi
Oh, and by the way, Thank you for not hiding behind AC, as every other responder in this mini-thread has done. I appreciate it.
Will those of you who think that you know what you are doing, get out of the way of those of us who know what we are doi
"If Microsoft couldn't patent, say, the intellectual capital in it's latest tools, so that all and sundtry could copy them without any paying back to the inventor, why on earth would Microsoft bother to invent new tools and processes?"
Total stab in the dark here, but ummmm...to make things easier for themselves? The "intellectual capital", whatever that means, is still protected by Copyright. Nobody could claim MS work as their* own. Then, if someone found a better way to do the same thing, there would be ***competition***. Isn't that what "Freedom To Innovate" is? I'm soooo confused.
*this is valid so GN stfu
"Go on. Eat a bug. Go on. Go on. Here's some money. Eat a bug."
I believe there are anti racketeering laws in your USA against just such a shakedown tactic.
All we need is one firm to blow the whistle & M$ is in a world of hurt.
Correct me if I am wrong.
Go work for ANY Microsoft 'Gold Partner' and you'll see how far a company has to open it's behind to get the cheaper licensing. And oh I forgot to mention, they can always come around and change stuff or make a 'friendly request' to implement a solution using their software (and friendly request as in, if you don't we'll pull your status). This is especially true in Gold Partners that provide services to other customers (like hosting companies).
My record: I have worked so far for 5 Gold Partners in Europe and the US and they all have the same 'problem'.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
True free trade is like every other aspect of life. It is a survival of the fitest competition that is advantageous to the fit and to the detrement on the unfit. In the case of economics a free trade environment puts the power in the hands of those with means. One good example of this is the employer and employee relationship in 'right to work' states. There is little or no government intervention and the since the employer has the greatest means and therefore is more fit the employer exploits the unfit to become even more fit.
First, right to work laws by their very nature are an interevention in free trade otherwise the laws wouldn't exist. Having said that though I Googled "right to work" and went through the results without finding a paper that had the cons of these laws. So I then added "pro con" and still didn't get any result, of the ten results on the first page I went through 9 of them but didn't check the tenth one because it was about the abortion debate, that said what the cons of right to work laws are though some gave what are the pros. Now can you provide a link to a research paper that supports your belief that right to work laws only benefit those with the means (and what you mean by "means")?
Direct competition is to the benefit of the consumer and therefore not in the best interest of market leaders.
Agreed! And you don't have real competition if you don't have a free market. Any market with restrictions, other than those that enforce contracts and such, is not a free market. Neither is a market free that has any barrier other than financial, know how, and ability to enter. The closest we come to a free market in the US is in FOOS, or in the illegal drug trade.
Adam Smith believed that the only right that is certain is the right to keep the things that you earn and accumulate. What that means is that Adam Smith and the principle of capitalism supports that idea that you have a right to your luxery vehicle despite the consequences to others.
If you really believe this, I suggest you read Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments . His first sentence in it is "How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it."
FalconShould there be a Law?
"The false presentation of someone else's writing as one's own. In the case of copyrighted work, plagiarism is illegal." (from Google definition of plagiarism - plagiarism by me, of course)
OK, so remove copyright, and plagiarism isn't illegal any more, so what do you do to stop it, then? OK if you're in acedemia, but the rest of the world no longer has any rules against it.
Again, the world doesn't owe anyone a living. Copyright and patent law, however, assume just that. If you invent something, and you don't profit as much as you'd like, tough titties. It was your free choice to sink the costs on invention, and it is just wrong for you to expect the rest of us, who can actually play well together, to prop you up.Interesting, but beside the point. Without copyright and patent, just about the ONLY way to make a profit out of your intellectual work is to keep it secret from the rest of the world - as happened before the patent laws came into being - and just sell the end results to people who don't have any insight into the process that produced the product. Making information freer by removing such laws? The opposite, actually!
No amount of hurt feelings or shattered worldview on your part will change that. My feelings aren't hurt, and my world view is quite solid, thank you very much.Will those of you who think that you know what you are doing, get out of the way of those of us who know what we are doi
Can be estimated, however I don't know what some of these costs are, so if some other /.er's could fill in the blanks, please help.
The cost of bringing ONE well-defined issue to court and seeing it all the way through to a verdict of some kind can be estimated at $200,000. Not SCO-style trawling, but one or two concrete issues mixed with the usual absurd claims that get thrown out.
What I want to know is an annual price range for Unix licenses/packages. Then, post the annual costs of some higher-end Oracle packages that probably run on a Unix. Finally, what's the cost of a Windows Server package with lots of CAL's and some support thrown in.
From those estimates you can get a good idea what they are asking for. Not too much, but certainly generating revenue for Microsoft off the normal sales accounting.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
And because YOU say that, Mr/Mrs/Ms Anonymous, it MUST, of course, be true!
Will those of you who think that you know what you are doing, get out of the way of those of us who know what we are doi
If you're writing an article or interviewing someone with a headline of "Microsoft Getting LINUX money", then don't leave in the crap about the Best Fajita house in wherever. DIAF, author, DIAF.
IIRC, It actually helped kill of the instamatic. Yeah, they were hugely profitable, but they could not get their sales volume up. In fact, they plummeted. Nobody wanted to pay the top dollar that Polaroid was charging. The way to maximize their profits would have been to allow kodak to continue and to get a cut of each film sold. But Polaroid elected not to do that.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I am going to call 'urban myth' on this one. If I'm wrong all of slashdot can give me virtual noogies as punishment.
1) If a publicly traded company is under real threat of lawsuit, they would have to publicly declare it or face SEC and exchange scrutiny.
2) Now suppose that they pay up quietly. There has to be a paper trail somewhere. Not openly declaring expenses on your balance sheet/share holder report once again may be a violation.
3) There would be dozens of people involved. The CIO, the CIO's staff, possibly a CEO + staff, accountants + a legal team to review any licensing agreement. Multiply by dozens of companies and you have hundreds of people involved, at minimum. No way a secret can be kept for any length of time with that many people involved. One disgruntled accountant is all you need to blow the lid off.
4) Why would they hush it up? Why not proudly proclaim that they have insured that they are in compliance and that they respect IP?
It doesn't add up. There is a much higher likelyhood that Chewbacca is from Endor.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Does that mean you're willing to share your money with the patent holders? Or do you mean sharing like my daughter who thinks sharing means that she gets to use her sister's stuff but not the other way around?
If you patent patenting stuff then what is stopping me to patent patenting patenting stuff?
This looks more and more as the Absurdland lol...
Please name what you consider to be the most important and valuable software tools and processes nobody would have bothered to invent without patent protection.
Then, please, name what you consider to be the most important and valuable software tools and processes people did bother to invent without patent protection.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
Not if I patent *pending* patents first...
A right to be identified as the creator of the original work?
Please allow me to introduce myself...
Do you lay traps for programmers who get killed before they reach Norway?
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
Just for the record, I've had a Mac, and I've gone back. I used it for about six or seven months, but its UI was incompatible with my workflow. (I use a GNU/Linux-based system on an iMac G5 nowadays.)
Look out!
I personally feel that MS is spreading like a fast cancer in software community. Cure it or it will kill all innovation and competition in the industry.
OK, I know we're just being silly here, but his patent would stop your patent if it were in place beforehand.
Information doesn't want to be anthropomorphized anymore.
Right...and people believe this?
"Off the record" payments of this sort would likely expose MS and the company doing the paying to various legal actions like: "monopolistic practices", "extortion", "bribery", and violations of the Sarbanes Oxley rules.
Something doesn't smell right with this "story"...it doesn't pass the "critical thinking" test (not that such a test is important for most people).
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
2. No locking.
3. User permissions too coarse-grained.
Not really. You think in terms of show of force. But it is very simple to crack the system. It is a downhill battle.
As with people like Michael Bloomberg and Rupert Murdoch for example, they are too rich for the laws to apply to them.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
Who cares? His choice of language doesn't make him wrong. I find it quite interesting that you chose to attack his use of language instead of his calling for the murder of patent trolls.
Slashdot: Where language is more important than ideas? WTF?
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
I was thinking of TenDRA, the TACK (used by the Minix C compiler) and LLVM. The 4.3BSD-Reno pcc makes four.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Resorting to murder threats etc, is rather pathetic, I agree.
;-) I work for a Microsoft partner, and it took me 3 days to get a copy of Win2003 installed. I had a valid key, but it only worked with the specific download, that was having issues. I had several copies of MSDN Win2003 that were worthless, because we couldn't get the key to work correctly. Finally, had to use a retail version, just to get my testing done.
> This means MS sees me as someone to shake down rather than to make a customer.
You couldn't tell this by the release of Vista, and the soon to be/if not already mandatory Microsoft Genuine Advantage?
Scott Carr
Keep in mind that in this scenario "interoperability" is Novell's goal. Not Microsoft's. Microsoft having the source code is a moot point.
But just for giggles - let's say that Microsoft really doesn't mind interoperability. But working on it isn't in their interest. Along comes Novell thinking "hey - its in our interest!" Novell doesn't mind doing the work. They just need to know what has to be done. This deal could have given them that information. Or at least, that's what they were after.
Again - it takes a small leap of faith to agree with the scenario. But it is very plausible. I've seen plenty of deals and contract negotiations start with the best of intentions and end up convoluted, unworkable messes with someone getting a short end due to various reasons (greed, incompetence, etc.).
They're not only about recouping R&D costs. They are partly about that, though.
The primary idea behind a patent is not to prevent the sharing of innovations but to promote it. Someone who has done big R&D and wants to protect his work has one natural way of doing so: to keep it a complete secret. A patent is supposed to keep anyone from copying his work for a relatively short amount of time in exchange for publication of exactly how to replicate the work.
This all made sense when the economy was mostly mining and manufacturing, the rate of innovation was much slower, patents were granted for industrial processes or entirely new classes of consumer products, and patents actually expired.
Now we have patent extensions, every little tweak of inactive ingredients in a pill gets a new patent, Amazon can patent storing customer information in a database (one-click checkout), Microsoft is threatening to sue people for patents they probably have no rights to have, SCO is suing for patents, trade secrets, and copyrights for things they probably don't even own, and real innovation according to most CEOs of large companies is about how to screw the investors out of a bigger options package.
An important distinction here: patents are intended to reward the inventor in the short term, in exchange for giving the invention/creation back to benefit society at some point in the future.
This is one of the main reason that patents are public. If the inventor wanted to keep a true monopoly on the creation, he would keep it a trade secret. (Compare the handling of RSA vs RC5 encryption schemes.)
Of course, with hardware inventions, it might be hard to keep the product a trade-secret for very long.
Ultimately, I strongly feel that nobody should ever have a perpetually legally enforced monopoly. In the near term (the length of which is the subject of some debate), a monopoly is a nice reward.
Copyright is different, and has a necessarily longer term, although current moves by media owners to lengthen copyright to insane time frames is also nutso. (Anything longer than 20 years past date of creation seems unjustifiable in my mind.)
His next sentence is letting you know that you do not have to be here...it is optional, and it is left up to you to decide that.
Now, your reply here...
Freedom of speech OK as long as everyone agrees with everything you want them to say, but not when someone disagrees with you? Nice person! Freedom of speech is OK, even if the person is being an asshole. In fact, you are allowed to post here, even when you're an asshole. So, would you please quit sounding as if some great injustice has happened to you. This is a public forum, and you've got just as much right as I do to post here, but people will have a hard time listening to you, if you are hostile.And one final thing. Slashdot, along with democratic government, along with the Roman Forum, are all systems where people talk and share ideas, out in the open. To bash wikipedia, linux, and others, and also miss the glaring examples all around you of how it does work, i.e. cities, communities, brings me to suggest that you look at the models again. Try to believe that it could work, instead of undermining your thoughts with contempt.
But remember, no one is commanding that you do something. It's all optional.
---FourChannel---
There is no problem with sharing knowledge in the software market. Reverse engineering works. Patents were not introduced here to enable the spread of knowledge but to provide companies with a source of state protection to account for how easily reverse engineering disposed of trade secrets in the tech industry.
The original basis for patents have gone altogether.
I could respond to each one and explain my viewpoints and opinions, but that would take a lot of time
-- jchenx
There seems to be some misunderstandings in patents court proceedings. If I invent something today and you decided to file a patent for it (my work) before I do, my patent application will trump yours, even if the clerks initially approve yours. And then I will take you to court. Naturally you are just a puny inventor and I am a large corporation with an entire army of lawyers. Now, then, we can play this nice and you can sign over your patent in return for a T-shirt or I will fight you in court. Of course, I can't win, but I stay in battle for five years -can you?
How so? Smith is maintaining that your right to a luxury vehicle trumps the right of someone less fortunate to eat. Simply because he doesn't believe you will choose the luxury vehicle over your fellow man doesn't change that.
Can you point to one quote wherein Adam Smith says a life of luxury trumps life? Seems to me you can't have a life of luxury if you can't live.
You are picking a young market. That hardly tells us anything about where a free market ends up. Landline phones started with a series of patents and men with clubs so lets look elsewhere for mature markets. How about soda, tobacco or credit cards.
Ok, let's look at soda. My favorite soda is Steward's Ginger Beer though it used to be something like Oldtime Ginger Beer. Dealing with tobacco, I smoke mostly Nat Sherman's Touch of Clove. As for credit cards in a typical week I may get three or four offers from different companies. Some are American Express, Dinner's Club, Discover, MasterCard, or VISA. I have also had credit cards issued by retail chains. There is no shortage of companies that issue credit cards, actually it pisses me off I get so many offers. To make it harder for someone to steal my id I end up shreading and or burning all of these offers, simply credit card companies make it too easy to steal id. What's worse, at least where I live, is that less than one out of ten people even check id when handed a card or bank check. I know of only one place that consistently checks id, my bank. They even go a step further, when my sister writes a check to me, from a different account at the same bank, the bank calls her to make sure she gave me the check. My brother-in-law gets pissed they call.
FalconShould there be a Law?