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80% of MS Server Protocols Are Unpatented
perlow writes "ZDNet blogger Jason Perlow and Centrify's Tom Kemp discover that 80 percent of all Microsoft server protocols are un-patented. What exactly then, did SAMBA license? Are Microsoft's patent and intellectual property threats simply the growls of a paper tiger?"
...is what they licensed
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
Perhaps they licensed the 20%?
... afterall, to patent them, they would need to describe them :)
Tie two birds together: although they have four wings, they cannot fly. (The blind man)
Why should a server protocol be patented? A patent should be for something you don't want copied. If I were selling servers I'd want to interoperate with clients and other servers.
Oh, Microsoft. Never mind, my bad.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
"ZDNet blogger Jason Perlow and Centrify's Tom Kemp discover that 80 percent of all Microsoft server protocols are un-patented. What exactly then, did SAMBA license?
Perhaps something from that other 20%? Or maybe a different kind of license and not a patent license?
99% could be unpatented, it only takes one patent to ruin you.
is competition good, or is duplication of effort bad?
"What exactly then, did SAMBA license?"
Ummm, the other 20%?
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
ZDNet blogger Jason Perlow and Centrify's Tom Kemp discover that 80 percent of all Microsoft server protocols are un-patented. What exactly then, did SAMBA license?
Is this article trying to present me with the logic: 80% of protocols are un-patented, therefore SMB is un-patented?
Because I don't see how that follows at all. Is SMB part of the 80% or part of the 20%? If you want to know what SAMBA licensed, why don't you just ask them? I'm sure they'd know...
Comment of the year
To keep Ballmer from tossing chairs at Andrew!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
While the protocols might not be patented/copyrighted, there would be trade secrets and documentation, that in exchange for the 'licensing', Microsoft provides documentation, perhaps even assistance in the creation of SAMBA.
I don't read AC A human right
slashdots endless grabbing at straws or the two minutes of microsoft hate that they need to post daily to keep the lemmings in line?
It's tempting to say that they're unpatented because MS doesn't want to document their functionality, which would force them to keep supporting older versions (instead of just forcing people to upgrade everything whenever a version of something comes out).
However, I think the real reason is that MS is realizing that sw patents are a god-awful waste of time and resources to obtain. If you have 20 or so new protocols, the fees plus attorney time, plus appeals, plus developers having to document the necessary features, etc can really add up, and it's not altogether clear that such a patent will hold up in court. IBM clued into this a while ago, and MS may have figured out that they make enough money with branding, and vendor and user lock-in that the potential costs of patent licensing outweigh the financial gains.
Let's hope so!
Better get ourselves a Scissors Lizard to beat the Paper Tiger.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
the other 20% is the extend and extinguish
"Are Microsoft's patent and intellectual property threats simply the growls of a paper tiger?"
;)
So what they're asking is, is Microsoft full of shit? Come on, give me a hard one
(insert obligatory "that's what she said")
10 FILL MUG WITH COFFEE
20 DRINK COFFEE
30 GOTO 10
I didn't think Samba licensed _any_ patents. They just paid for the release of the documentation- people could to buy the documentation for EUR10000 _without_ any acceptance of the validity of the patents, it just meant microsoft might still sue them. At least that's what Neelie Kroes said, but I see the corporate spin doctors have removed the references from wikipedia.
The slashdot bias is amazing. If Microsoft had patented more, everyone would complain about them hording patents. If Microsoft doesn't patent everything but still wants to license it out, then slashdotters complain. It doesn't make sense.
Also, for the record: A company doesn't need to have a patent in order to license the use of software. The purpose of the patent is just to prevent other people from illegally using someone else's intellectual property. It has nothing to do with the ability to license.
um ad and the like are basterdised implimentations of kerberos and ldap.... they cant patent something that is not their property.
If you read the linked articles (which I know you didn't), you will see that SAMBA wanted rights to ALL of the technologies, so they had to pay for patent licensing on that elusive 20%.
I know I'm going to get modded Troll for this, but does every article about patent licensing and Microsoft have to be so skewed anti-MS?
Seriously Slashdot, make up you mind. You can't have it both ways.
This is obvious, but since nobody has said it, and since this specific topic hasn't come up yet on other /. patent discussions...
IANAL, but...
Shipping your product is equivalent to publication. It start a timer, 1 year in some places, 6 months in others. You have to have your patent applications into the office within that time, or the art is considered "published" and can never be patented. The definition of "shipping" can be pretty darned nebulous, as well. Sending out a beta with a regular NDA is also probably considered publication. You've got to get quite a bit more serious about the restrictions to have a hope of preserving patent rights, from what I understand, and it fact it may be just plain impossible, once it goes out your doors.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
is Microsoft a paper tiger.
What I would be curious to know is how that 20% is distributed. One or two lumps(albeit probably very profitable lumps, like Exchange or Sharepoint) or evenly mixed into virtually everything?
If I'm reading Wikipedia correctly, SMB1 is an IBM invention, while SMB2 is Microsoft's, but with backward compatibility. If that's true, it's murky gray...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Message_Block
Anything that threatens their desktop or server OS market is a target of the most obscene threats, even those that could result in criminal prosecution if they were ever discovered to be done with malice in order to protect their monopoly.
Threats are Microsoft's business of the day. That's their plan for the future to thwart off all competition to their desktop OS. No matter that they begged, borrowed, and stole 90% of the ideas that went into it. If you can't compete any longer you litigate, or threaten to in order to have customers potentially switching to the competition stop in their tracks.
Those in their right mind knew this was just blather from the Ballmer, but it is enough to get companies re-examining their plans.
You can't trust Microsoft and you can't trust that they won't try to patent what they have failed to patent so far. Nor can you keep them from changing things once you have developed around them. You all saw the sheer bullshit with the ISO so you must understand that they are far more devious than this in other areas. We as the watchful eye haven't had a chance yet to gaze into their other practices, the real practices that keep people locked into their technologies.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
The 'Protocols' have ALWAYS been fairly open for MS Server products.
The part that SAMBA is licensing and NEEDS to license is when they are implementing features normally found in Windows Server that are not open.
Off top of my head I would guess these would be:
ACL & Security
Group Policy Features
Domain Features
Roaming Profiles, etc.
FS Search Network Queries ala Vista/Windows Desktop Search
etc etc etc...
The freaking communications and protocols are never been a big MS secret, as they are just evolutionary methods, it is the guts that SAMBA also tries to provide that has always been 'reverse engineered' and is now 'licensed' instead.
Geesh...
I always thought the classic reason why a company wouldn't patent a proven technology is to avoid documenting it. To file for the patent you would need to document critical detail and behavior which could be something the competition could read up on and build new products on the idea. Or in other words, if they never file for the patent they never have to claim it exists. Keeping it off the books keeps it obscure and keeps it theirs.
Looking through the list I wonder how many of these patents have been contested and/or how many of these patent applications should be rejected. For instance, under the "Web Browser Federated Sign-On Protocol" Microsoft lists patent applications 2005-0223217-A1 and 2006-0112422-A1. There exists prior art for 2005-0223217-A1 claim 14 and further in A-Select and I think for the rest of the claims in Shibboleth. I would have to study 2006-0112422-A1 more in detail, but it looks like about half of the claims there also have prior art in those systems.
In a perfect world, only truly original, truly innovative protocols would be patentable. Well, in a perfectly perfect world, anything you could do on existing hardware would not be patentable beyond the original patents on the hardware itself, but I digress.
"There are many good yet unique ways to do __TASK__, none significantly better than any other, here is ours" or "there is only a handful of obvious good ways to do __TASK__, and we got to the patent office first" items should never be patented. I'm betting the 80% fall in these categories, along with much of the remaining 20%.
Of all the work MS has done in networking the past 20+ years, I'm sure they've earned 1 or 2 legitimate software patents, assuming for the sake of argument there is such a thing.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
2. File patent claims on the ones that are available.
3. Dodge chair(s) thrown by Ballmer.
4. ???
5. Profit!!!!
Because Microsoft's ultimate plan is going open source!
With what microsoft has at their disposal, they could make any group of people's lives very difficult for any reason they felt like.
Which leaves documentation
This is a bigger thing than you might realize. Going by your music example, it's like trying to learn how to play a symphony from listening to it.
Buying the 'license' gets you the sheet music and the assistance of the author.
Saving that much effort does save $$$ and as long as Microsoft wasn't being too greedy(possibly realizing that samba would be able to reverse engineer it soon enough no matter what), it'd be cheaper to pay the money than perform the otherwise necessary back engineering.
I don't read AC A human right
OH wait.....
I misread, I thought it said unexplained.
My Bad
A patent is for something where you want to make money off of the copies.
Is this why SAMBA had to reverse engineer everything? M$ advertises a lot. How did I miss the adverts about all those licensed OS and network stack alternatives? Oh yeah, the M$ way of making money of their patents is to keep everyone else out of the market. Forgot about that one.
No calls now, I'm
You've really stopped trying to pretend you're someone else, haven't you?
The reason SAMBA licensed the Microsoft protocols is fairly obvious. It was purely a business decision. Every day that SAMBA doesn't know exactly how the Microsoft protocols work, is a day their application isn't quite fully compatible.
For most BSD/Linux geeks, such as myself, this is not much of an issue as the current system is good enough. However, Linux providers are trying to get big business on board and most big business "good enough" doesn't cut it. If you can't promise 100% compatibility with the largest vendor in town, your out of luck.
It sucks that the Linux community has to cater to the Microsoft bobble heads that run most big business IT departments. But, that is the price for wide adoption.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
Dat's a nice little server ya got dere, buddy. It'd be a shame if it burned down. Heh, heh, heh.
Have gnu, will travel.
This is because, for the most part, MS server protocols are based on well established standards. RPC, SMB, Kerberos, etc.
Doesn't everybody know this?
I got dibs on WINS!
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
I wish to make the following points, 1. not everything can be patentable and even if it patentable and patented, it can be challenged. 2. if something can be reduced to a material form then it is protected by copyright 3. you can licence all forms of intellectual property, not just patented material. You can license copyrighted material as well! I would imagine that all MS protocols have been reduced to a material form, i.e. source or binary code, and therefore such protocols are protected by copyright (provided they are not public domain, expired or copied!!!) Therefore, MS can license. However, I am not familiar with the contents of the SAMBA license - I imagine that it would have licensed a variety of patented and copyrighted material as needed by SAMBA. That probably answers the commentator's question, "What exactly then, did SAMBA license? Are Microsoft's patent and intellectual property threats simply the growls of a paper tiger?"
- time for a patent troll to patent these protocols, and then sue Microsoft for using them ! Lol
I would be willing to bet that 100 percent of any protocol can't be patented if you really to a thorough search. They all amount to some sort of conversation that has its roots in "How we talk". Humans have been doing this for a long time. If I remember correctly, folks like IBM opposed software patents in the 70s, believing that they would stifle innovation and that they weren't the right mechanism. They only started to do them as a defense mechanism. (They negotiate a lot of mutual use agreements with their portfolio.... You infringe to, let's talk!)
Patents were designed to protect people that had to invest millions in manufacturing infrastructure. (Why would they invent if anyone could copy without paying.) Now they are being used to suck money from people who are contributing.
The summary is misleading or mistaken.
The Protocol Freedom Information Foundation (PFIF) made a one-off copyright payment of 10,000 Euros to Microsoft in return for documentation of the protocols. The PFIF is allowed to pass on to the Samba developers information gleaned from the documentation, and the Samba developers are allowed to release source code based on what they have learnt.
MS were required to offer this deal to all comers after they lost their European anti-trust legal case.
The agreement requires MS to identify any patents that they hold which they believe relate to the protocols (this is so that the developers are not at risk of implementing something described in the documentation and finding themselves under legal attack based on a previously undisclosed MS patent).
http://samba.org/samba/PFIF/
MS offers a patent licensing program to go with the copyright licensing program, but neither the Samba developers nor anyone acting for them have taken that up (and couldn't even if they wished to - it involves per-copy royalties, which are GPL incompatible).
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