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Red Hat Vows To Stand Up To Patent Intimidation
mrcgran writes "Eweek is reporting on Red Hat's assurances that can continue to deploy Linux without fear of legal retribution from Microsoft. This, despite the increasingly vocal threats emanating from Redmond. 'In a scathing response to Ballmer's remarks, Red Hat's IP team said the reality is that the community development approach of free and open-source code represents a healthy development paradigm, which, when viewed from the perspective of pending lawsuits related to intellectual property, is at least as safe as proprietary software. "We are also aware of no patent lawsuit against Linux. Ever. Anywhere," the team said in a blog posting.'"
Running on Red Hat Enterprise 4, i was damn happy about it. Im now more happy with what i use because Red Hat is showing much integrity.
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And even if brought to court - the case may be dismissed if the claims aren't good or if the situation is caused by unwillingness to reveal what the infringements are.
So in all - just call back to Redmond and ask about the details about the alleged infringements. Or write a letter.
On the other hand if everybody reading this sends a postcard to M$ HQ asking for specifics regarding the infringements they may be at least annoyed, but as long as the writing is sensible it's still legal. Just try to get a postcard with a penguin on for this! :-)
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Anyone complaining about infrigements better make sure their own company's website isn't hosted on a Redhat server cuz it probably is lol. Stupid people and their Linux ignorance lol.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
The blog posting for the response is dated 14 May 2007. Red Hat didn't respond to last week's attack from Steve Ballmer, this response addresses Ballmer's Newsweek interview in which he claims that open source is infringing on 235 Microsoft patents.
All the have to do is make the PHB's think it's a possibility.That alone will,when mixed with the CYA mentality at most businesses keep Linux usage down.Which is the whole point.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
remember that come next year, there is likely to be a US administration less willing to ignore Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior than the last one, and the last thing Microsoft wants is a renewed DoJ campaign against them in the midst of Europe cleaning their clocks.
get serious.
I hate the bastards in power as much as the next guy, but to imagine that the democrats are less owned by big business than the republicans is self delusion on a grand scale.
Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.
This kind of thing doesn't work. It's been shown time and again. Microsoft's Steve Ballmer is becoming the laughing stock of the tech industry.
SCO is an example. There was some uncertainty before everything fell out. I don't think there is any uncertainty about patents or copyrights regarding Linux anymore. There is a lot of confidence in Linux now.
Microsoft needs to get off the litigation and on to innovation. Ballmer seems to not understand what this company attitude does to Microsoft's customer base and its reputation.
When I see comments like this I see that Microsoft needs a new CEO with a vision and not a Steve Ballmer with a litigation team. Just my perception. I think there are many others who share this view.
Fresh horses and more whiskey for my men.
Microsoft is in a very curious position right now. The SCO assault (which was to their benefit, whether or not they were behind it) has sputtered below the point of PR credibility. Linux is gaining ground slowly but steadily, particularly on the server side. The server side represents most of the "movable" machines as far as OS is concerned. Windows already has most of the world's desktops and so many users and businesses hooked into Office that they are all but impregnable in the near term as far as serious market share loss is concerned. (As Linux has discovered, it turns out the biggest and hardest barriers to acceptance are the re-training of users and the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality.) Oddly enough, this also makes showing growth difficult (Vista).
To compete against free software on the server side, there are some unique problems. Much more savvy "users" in the form of sysadmins who can and will learn new systems, stable and trusted software bases which provide both freedom to tweak and freedom from vendor lock in, and a very long history of Unix style systems proving themselves equal to server tasks. (Indeed, Solaris itself is now freely available, for those who are gun shy of Linux.) Licensing costs and concerns are impossible - Linux is free in many forms.
Hence the temptation to use patents. Patents are one of the few weapons that cannot be easily countered by an open source software movement, particularly if the patents have the effect of shutting open source software out of certain markets altogether. The lack of revenue to pay lawyers looms large here - in the US legal system that's a very dangerous position to occupy. But there are still drawbacks for Microsoft:
Much major open source work is not done in the US, but in places like the EU. Microsoft's position in the EU is weaker, and opening an offensive there would be more difficult. Politically it would also have ramifications, possibly serious ones.
If Microsoft DOES open a patent offensive against major open source projects, they run the risk of triggering Armageddon - a broad scale patent war that could leave the entire US software industry in ruins. There are defensive alliances behind open source who's potential in a legal contest must be weighed.
If they go TOO gung-ho, it could have the effect of helping to convince Congress to remove the software patent go-ahead.
In the short term, lawsuits against the free software key players least able to defend themselves would have a major harmful effect on the community (to say nothing of the individuals caught up in it.) However, potential long term effects are another story - Microsoft doesn't hold large legal clubs everywhere.
A lot of our manufacturing is now being done overseas, and many companies are outsourcing wherever they can. If all of a sudden the price of outsourcing was being compatible with non-Windows systems INSIDE the US (foreign governments may mandate avoiding dealing with someone like Microsoft, after all...), it would be very interesting indeed to see how that played out...
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
O_o
Since when is not the Bush administration known for being the 'big-corp-is-now-in-power' period? Through-and-through the bush administration and the upper parts of the republican party are supported by big corporations. The big republicans are playing in the game, too. Big business is in the white house more than it ever was -- why else would Blackwater stand untouched facing current criticism? Why else would we see an andministration that knowingly year after year plans for a budget deficit that is going to sink the country but make certain companies filthy rich?
Don't let the current Republican Administration make you think that it can't be any better any other way. Remember where this is coming from. Yes, this is power, power more corrupted than ever.
America is going to face a long and hard period after this where old debts will have to be repaid.
Recently some software vendors told us that because recent changes in US legislation they must be very careful on what they promise about the upcoming software they showcase. To make it short they said that spreading unsubstantiated FUD or keeping customers from choosing competing products with blanket promises that later go unfulfilled has been made equivalent to market manipulation and is punished harshly.
Would this "beware! there be dragons..." attitude of Microsoft constitute a violation of said US law? Is cutting air supply with vague patent threats a punishable behaviour?
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Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
As a company, I love RedHat. As a distribution, bleh. I've used RHEL and god damn...the up2date business where you have to have each computer registered to access their online package management system is complete bullshit. We've actually migrated to CentOS instead on some of the boxes and couldn't have been happier. Yum kicks the shit out of up2date. Not because it's a better system, but because yum doesn't give a shit who's making the requests, it just services them. We could just install yum in RHEL, but we figured we'd give CentOS a go since it claims to be 100% compatible with RHEL binaries and it's completely free. So far their claims have held up.
Because power corrupts. Big government is inherently in the pocket of corporations that can pay up.
I laugh every time I see a whiny liberal talk about how the Democrats are going to ride in on a white horse and come up with a thousand laws limiting the power of businesses. GUESS WHAT? It's the laws that give businesses the power.
Corporations cannot use force.
Governments can.
As soon as the democrats start fucking things up, the republican machine will get going and try to convince every undecided voter that the democrats are the problem.. wash, rinse, repeat.
After releasing code under the LGPL, it doesn't matter who "owns" it. A recipient is free to use it. Period.
The sticky situation is where you have released code under LGPL or BSD or whatever free license and it is based upon a patent that you own. In that case, you would claim that use of such code requires patent royalties to be paid to you. This is not the situation that Ballmer has been claiming. He is claiming that unspecified Linux code, independently developed by unspecified Linux people infringes on 235 unspecified patents owned by Microsoft. I do not believe that he has ever claimed code sharing and clearly, the recent code released under Microsoft's public source license is tainted for use in an Open Source project whether or not patents are involved. So if GNU is at risk of containing other people's IP then since MS uses GNU they are too. Um no. Actually if that GNU code infringes on a Microsoft patent, Microsoft would be the only one who could legally use that code without paying patent royalties.
What you write makes no sense and is not an analogous situation.
What Red Hat is doing is very important.
Actually, I call bullshit. Take the most corporate-friendly Democratic administration of the last half-century and it doesn't come close to the sheer mendacity and highest-bidder whorishness of the Bush Administration.
You are welcome on my lawn.
There is nothing to dislike about Red Hat. These FOSSies are just bitter that a company learned how to turn OSS into a profitable business. The only reason half these fools are sweating Shuttleworth is because he hasn't made it big with Ubuntu yet, so his distro is still 'cool.' I hate that steaming pile of crap, but then again I have been using Unix since I was 13.
Little do most people know, Red Hat has the key Fedora developers on Payroll, and tons of kernel hackers. Just one kernel hacker at Red Hat is likely to have hundreds of commits to kernel code. If you don't like their distro because they are not old school Unix, I can see that. But saying they suck yadda yadda with no substance, or complaining about a problem that is in older versions, is asinine. These days, I wouldn't even bother touching anything but RHEL (if on x86).
I'll probably get marked Troll for this, cause I am not hot in the pants for Marky Mark, and actually sticking up for a good company with a great product, but whatever.
"If you plant ice, you're gonna harvest wind."
Most people's actual problems are with fit and finish around dependencies and upgrades rather than the packages themselves.. I think Debian and it's derivatives would be just as good if they were based on RPMs instead of debs. Debs don't seem inherently superior to RPMs to me. Both are managed packages that come with files, a list of dependencies, and install scripts. The difference is in how package repositories are maintained and standards for creating packages. The Debian based distros inherit Debian's outstanding efforts at this. There is no reason why an RPM based distro wouldn't work as well but I have yet to see one that handles both major upgrades and ordinary day-to-day software installs and removals as well as Debian bases do.
It seems to be that you're not looking at the big picture in the software business. MS Windows, at least for the past 10 years, has been mostly sold through computer purchases - preinstalled, that is. So why would someone go buy MS Windows when they get it with their computer? The rankings you're citing are not a true indicator of how MS Windows is doing in the OS market. Most of Mac people buy their OS X from Apple, I am noting for you again: OS does not EXIST yet, it is pre-order without any kind of "early pay" rebate. People say "We buy whatever ships in whatever time", it is degree of unbeliavable trust.
General PCs come with Windows Pre installed,true. The thing is, consumers demand the earlier version of Windows even ready to pay extra price. The "Vista" they don't want worth billions of dollars of development costs. Microsoft spent billions for nothing.
Ronald Reagan brought about a decline of the middle class that continues to this day, thanks to his hostility towards working Americans and willingness to sell large parts of our society to the highest bidders.
You are welcome on my lawn.