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FOSS Community Can Combat Bad Patents
An anonymous reader lets us know about a new initiative designed to help shield the open source software community from threats posed by patent trolls. The initiative, called Linux Defenders (the website is slated to go live tomorrow, Dec. 9), is sponsored by a consortium of technology companies including IBM. "The most novel feature of the new program... will be its call to independent open source software developers all over the world to start submitting their new software inventions to Linux Defenders... so that the group's attorneys and engineers can, for no charge, help shape, structure, and document the invention in the form of a 'defensive publication.' Linux Defenders will then also see to it that the publication, duly attributing authorship of the invention to the developer who submitted it, is filed on the IP.com Web site, a database used by the US Patent and Trademark Office and other patent examiners throughout the world when they are trying to determine whether a proposed patent is truly novel..."
When a patent is under examination, others can submit examples of prior art. However, if they do and the patent is subsequently granted, the patent cannot be challenged in court on the basis of that prior art. That's why nobody does it -- they assume the examiners are idiots and prefer to take their shot in court instead. So - does this website count the same way? If so, it might not be such a great idea...
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
> I would rather think it would be something like trying to patent a FOSS name like "Linux" as a "trademark" and not a patent.
Errrr ... the name "Linux" is a trademark. The trademark belongs to an individual called Linux Torvalds.
http://www.linuxmark.org/
If you were to fork the codebase, change it without going through kernel.org , and you then decided to distribute it, then according to copyright law you can only do so with permissions given to you by the copyright holders.
The copyright holders have set out their terms for granting such permission in a license document called GPL v2. The terms for what you were trying to do include a condition such that when you redistribute it you must offer the source code to anyone who asks you for it.
Trademark law says that you may not call your product "Linux" without Linus' permission. You may call it something else entirely and distribute it without Linus' permission, but if you want to call it Linux then you must have Linus' permission.
Linux is now the only Unix-ish operating system in many financial and engineering firms.
I don't think "many" is a word for the financial and engineering firms.
I work for a large Avionics company that employs over 20,000 people. Currently Linux is used for some engineering desktops and some compute farm clusters. Alot of development relies on Solaris of all different versions. Most of the servers are either Solaris or HP-UX. All of the financial stuff, the most critical, is run on AIX.
Large corporations and firms rely on pay for support from vendors for their hardware and operating systems. Red Hat's support for example is atrocious at best. They constantly release kernels into the RHEL 5 tree that break many components causing loss of local data, and in some cases total periphial function lost.
I certianly don't have anything against Linux, just saying you may be overstretching with that last statement.