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Groklaw Examines Microsoft's Promises
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Groklaw has examined that 'new leaf' Microsoft turned the other day. PJ has a lengthy analysis of Microsoft's latest promises. To make a long story short, the promises are more of the same stuff and don't help anyone but Microsoft. They only protect 'noncommercial' development and are set up to create a patented standards toll road so that Microsoft can charge competitors to compete. As PJ puts it, 'This is a promise to remain incompatible with the GPL, as far as I can make out.'"
Excerpt from a post by lawyer Andrew Updegrove, an open-standards advocate who tracks the issue on his Standards Blog:
I expect that it is no coincidence that this announcement comes just two business days (and only one, for most of the world) before the Ballot Resolution Meeting convenes in Geneva next Monday. This will effectively give those participating in the discussions of Microsoft's OOXML document format no opportunity to fully understand what Microsoft has actually promised to do, while reaping the maximum public relations benefit.
How about Sun's legal threats against people who innovate on top of Java in unauthorized fashion?
Is there any party Microsoft has made a patent sharing agreement with to date that is not a net recipient?
Microsoft to Novell: "Take this money or we will sue you"
Novell to Microsoft: "Curse your threats, we surrender!"
Slashdot to Novell: "Thhhrrrruuuppppp!!!!!"
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Thanks, Your horor movie idea remonded me of some things I though about way back when the GPLv3 was being discussed.
I was claiming that MS was going to offer some patent infringment indemnification and do it in a way to halt GPLv3 projects because of the anti patent wording. The if you can't bla bla blah, you can't use the GPL. Now, I was thinking that this is a big ass hole that anyone could claim indemnification, associated with the acusition of software in some way, but not extend it in the way the GPLv3 required. I suspected this would end up being tied to a purchase of windows and there would be some way to buy it without but it would cost more money. Now that groups like SAMBA and a few others that sort of rely on MS operating systems for their use, I can see things shaping to where they either have to pay through the nose or devlope without buying MS software. OSS Office programs looking to reverse engineer MS office suits for document compatability and all would be effected too.
They are halfway there to my horor scene. If they go the rest of the way, what would SAMBA do? How would that effect the FSF is a high level project like Samba decided to revert back to GPLv2 in order to get around this insane situation? How dificult is it going to be to get everyone who contributed to any GPLv3 projects but kept the copyright to give consent to move that code to another license if it comes to that.
I hate to say this, but I think my warning is comming to fruitation which would be a horor movie in real life for some.
What right do Microsoft have to force me to pay for their product?
It's called the rule of law, and at the moment it's being enforced selectively. I would be arrested by jackbooted thugs if I took Microsoft products without paying, and would be forced to return the products.
Microsoft is illegally using its monopoly position to extort billions from me and other customers, and nobody's stopping the theft, nobody's making them return their ill-gotten gains.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
So... basically they've promised not to litigate in cases where they probably wouldn't have bothered to litigate anyway. I suppose in return they're hoping to get good will and increased success rates for the spurious litigation they do engage in?
"each company has responsibility to its shareholders to maximize the business and profits."..they ALSO have a duty to be of the public good and benefit and not be scumtards. They are GRANTED a license, an incorporation charter, based on all of the above, and if they violate that trust, the charter should be yanked, and in MS case, they passed that line years ago. You can "make shareholders more money" by doing any number of illegal or bogus things, doesn't mean it is right, correct or even marginally legal. How many times do they have to get caught before it sinks in they are a chronically abusive and criminal racketeering organization? They just got caught gaming the ISO standards committee, blatantly. and that's number 6478 on their list of scumbag-duggery, and that is what we only know about.
There's legal lawful and ethical business, and for everything else, there is the mafia, the MAFIAA, and microsoft. At least we got rid of enron. They need to be broken up, shares made worthless, physical plant sold at auction, top jerks investigated for the next 20 years. And I *blame* the jerkoff shareholders for *allowing* long term scumbaggery to go on, they deserve nothing but a full loss at this point, there isn't a single one of them who isn't under some guardianship who doesn't know how vile and wretched that corporation is. They *don't care* how many laws get broken or what nation strongarmed or who gets bribed or how their "profits" come about, or even when their fat retarded CEO makes public threats about patents and nowhere is the SEC around to call him on it, and he gets away with it, so I say, fuck em! I'm not seeing the asshole shareholders demanding he cough up the patents in question, they seem to dig on the threats, they have no ethics either, so screw them! I hope the EU keeps taking those jerks down, just like any other criminal gang. They don't *need* that corporation anymore, they know it is both an economic and a security hazard, so they *will* keep busting them, all the way to out of business in the EU. It's coming! they finally realized being held to ransom every year for billions of dollars to just get shipped out is *insane* when there is no need. The EU will be the first primarily non microsoft region, mark these words, and once MS falls in Europe, it will cascade and start to fall everywhere, because eventually all the businessmen will realize they have been pissing away good money for no real good reason.
Thinking Microsoft has very little is an opinion, and possibly a valid one. Saying they have nothing, is something else, and quite stupid.
No, what is stupid is to think that there are some magical hidden patents out there. The MS Office format has been around for many years, Microsoft's patents are all known and published, and people look at this stuff regularly.
If you try to make people concerned about Microsoft patents without giving specifics, you're spreading FUD and playing right into Microsoft's hand.
So, either put up and show us specific patents and specific ways in which interoperable open source implementations would infringe, or stop spreading Microsoft's FUD.
As I see it, Microsoft is just saying that they won't sue people who they know can't pay up. Sounds like M$ is just working on litigation efficiency.
-Tim Louden
Yeah, looking at it, it would seem like a win to standardize. But some companies felt otherwise, or saw a wider market, and wanted to ship multiple OSes. Microsoft punished these companies by canceling the standard volume discounts of up to 90%, effectively making the company pay retail - far more than its competitors.
In one world, paying everyone not to deal with your competitor is good business. In that world, his paying people to hunt near your house is justifiable as well.
We aim for a more civilized world. Where you can't just pay for the elimination of a competitor. Who cares if this is ultimately more free for business when we've discovered that it inevitably leads to abuse?
It's illegal to discriminate based on the color of an employee's skin. While this does restrict businesses and even no-doubt prevent some legitimate concerns like hiring to match the drapes, it's a value that society as a whole believes is worth enforcing. Monopoly-busting rules are the same. You're enjoying the protection of law (your competitor can't just kill you for interfering) but harming pretty much everyone else through blackmail (playing price games in a cornered market for essentials like food or housing is essentially blackmail) isn't something that law was intended to support.
As much as I like the concept of Free Software, you are dead wrong. MS would lose quite a bit of money if they released Windows under the GPL.
While you are right that they could sell Windows under the GPL, you forget to mention that anyone who bought it and wanted to subsequently distribute it, could copy it and sell it or give it away, thus lowering the value of the software to 0. What Microsoft could then do, is to sell support, but I hear that they're not too good at that, although I've never had any contact with MS support, to be honest.
As another point, Microsoft would have to release the source code to the Windows API under the GPL which... guess what? It's the same license of a concurrent implementation (Wine), which would then stop having to guess how the functions are really supposed to behave, thus reducing the incentive to have Windows even more, over time.
So, even though releasing Windows (the version doesn't matter) under the GPL might expand their market opportunities, it kills the market they already have, and, as such, it isn't such a good idea for them.