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Linspire Signs Patent Pact With MS
RLiegh sends us to an AP article reporting that Linspire has signed a patent deal with Microsoft. The company, which started out life as "Lindows," joins a growing list of patent agreements reached between Microsoft and vendors. Linspire will be granted a license to use True Type Fonts and "various code" that would allow for Linspire users to use voice on Windows Live Messenger as well as the usual patent protection for Linspire's customers. In return, among other things, Linspire will make Microsoft's search engine the default search on PCs shipped with their OS. Kevin Carmony, the CEO for Linspire, approached Microsoft a year and a half ago, according to the article.
And guess who just recently joined the board of Linspire who thinks that Linux market share percentage is the only goal worth following? Thanks for another useful contribution to the community, ESR!
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
Not to mention that Canonical is based in Europe where Microsoft's patents are currently worthless.
XePhi Computers sell really cheap Linux CDs! http://www.xephi.co.uk
I believe Ubuntu's founder made it clear that Ubuntu would not sell out to msft in this interview.
Why? Because these agreements don't protect the developers. In the long run, it won't do Linspire or whoever any good if they're legally allowed to sell Linux, but the community is dead.
This is how Microsoft "cuts off the air supply" of Free Software.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Quoting a poster on another board:
"Xandros are about to go BK (and this deal guarantees it), desperation
creates mistakes. EV1 was headed by a business incompetent. Novell had just had
Hovsepian parachute in with a desperate need to impose his authority despite a
shaky understanding of the business.
Seeing a pattern yet... only screwed up companies went for the deals. Knowing
that its real hard to take SCOX or MSFTs few success's totally seriously."
Come to think of it, scox was heading towards certain bankruptcy before msft got
involved. And let's face it folks, Linspire was never much of a distro.
The real Linux heavyweights: Redhat, Debian, Ubuntu, etc. Have flatly stated that they have no interest in msft's patent deals.
Mark Shuttle gives excellent commentary on the scam . . er, I mean deal, in this interview.
Did anyone here actually read the AP summary? Linspire went out and licensed actual code from MS for Windows Live Voice stuff, Windows Media files, and Truetype Fonts (it doesn't say anything at all about patents for fonts, they probably just mean providing the fonts). They're also working on translating between OpenXML and ODF. These are all pretty important to people who want commercial Linuxes to "just work" in a Windows-centric world, and can't settle for partially working reverse-engineered implementations. And oh yeah, they also agreed to protect Linspire users against legal action by Microsoft in regards to any patents. It sounds more like Linspire went out to license these technologies from MS, then MS wanted to add in the patent protection stuff to make it sound like another Linux vendor is paying protection money to them (even though MS seems to be paying most of the money so far). Yes, I hate MS, and yes I think the patent deals spread a lot of FUD, but I think Linspire has managed to get some good things out of this deal, depending on how much they paid. Or maybe MS paid them again?
Even funnier is the fact that Red Hat released replacements to the common TT fonts under a GPL license. The full-hinted versions will be released circa September 2007.
Where the fuck are all the other companies in sponsoring stuff like this?
Ubuntu went so far as to create a "restricted driver manager" that tells you when you're using binary drivers, why you shouldn't, and what you can do about it.
If you call this "peddling proprietary shit", then I don't think you understand more than one of those words.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Don't look at this as an attack on a vendor. If anything this is an attack on the GPLv3.
But more importantly look at the details of the deal. So far as I can tell, this stuff only covers the use of proprietary stuff with GPLed/third party offerings. Outside the idea of a GPLed program potentially using them, it won't effect the GPLv3 status at all _IF_ the agreement is specific in what code or IP the patent protection covers and that code isn't inside a GPLed program.
I think this might be another case of jumping the gun on too little details. The reaction to Novell's deal was way overblown and once the details were released, it appeared to no cover anything that would competing with microsoft blah blah blah. People said Novell got screwed. Well they did, by the GPL leaders who reacted over a bunch of misplaced hype. None of this was about the potentials of contaminating OSS. it is all about dealing with Microsoft. You don't even know the specfics of the deal and are accusing "Microsoft attacks" already.
At best, this just shows MS's effort to fracture the GPLv3. When enough companies need to stick around that projects will be forked or uninformed people implode over using the GPLv3 while having deals like this and become angry enough to make an ass of themselves it will be their doing. MS is likely attempting to do a divide and cause conflict within as their strategy of dealing with OSS and it is going to be highly successful.
TrueType was developed as a joint effort between Apple and Microsoft, because of Adobe's refusal to open their font format to third parties. For a while, it offered better font rendering than Type 1, at least on the Mac.
r aw_GX_and_Apple_Advanced_Typography
However, Adobe subsequently opened up their formats, and Apple pretty much lost interest in improving TrueType further. They shipped QuickDraw GX (based on TrueType), but pretty much killed it immediately by refusing to license any of it back to Microsoft. It has been replaced with Apple Advanced Typography (AAT, the system on OS X), which supports PostScript as well as TrueType, just as OpenType does.
http://mac.wikia.com/wiki/Apple_typography#QuickD
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
We really should do more about letting people know about non-US repositories like packman.de that include multimedia codecs.