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Has Microsoft's Patent War Against Linux Begun?
Glyn Moody writes "Microsoft has filed a suit against TomTom, 'alleging that the in-car navigation company's devices violate eight of its patents — including three that relate to TomTom's implementation of the Linux kernel.' What's interesting is that the intellectual property lawyer behind the move, Horacio Gutierrez, has just been promoted to the rank of corporate vice president at Microsoft. Is this his way of announcing that he intends going on the attack against Linux?"
Microsoft has patented a bunch of stuff related to FAT32 and has aggressively licensed FAT32. They would have pursued this regardless of the OS underneath the TomTom software.
is to get companies to start using a different FS on memory cards. In particular, it might be useful to pick one of the OSS FS and see it dominate the industry. All it would take is several large companies to decide to change NOW, and the rest would follow.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
FAT, as the lowest common denominator, is the best choice for flash cards and any other device that has to work in any random Windows, Mac, or Linux box. Otherwise, you'll have to develop and maintain filesystem drivers for your end users.
Netbooks are a serious threat to them, and they know it. To follow the netbooks will be larger machines with limited processing for the avg joes out there.
On a personal note, I find it very delightful that a company that Embraced, Enhanced, Extinguished, might be brought down by a tiny, cheap machine called EEE.
I know that it's always silly to try to predict the future, but here I go none the less. For the most part, all of the core computing applications have already been developed. Unless business processes change significantly, there are only so many systems that a company will ever need to deploy. There will be word processing applications, spreadsheets, databases, webpages, file servers, print servers and a slew of other devices. However the core of the network and the computing environment will remain rather static. Over the last decade, Microsoft developed a lot of core business applications in the form of Windows, Windows Server, Office and Exchange. As the room for innovation in the IT world shrinks, Microsoft will have to fall back to the patent portfolio. If their lawyers were smart, they patented every single technology that they could with the foreknowledge that sooner or later, someone else would want to develop software to do the same thing.
I think we are going to see Microsoft leveraging their patents more and more aggressively as time goes on. They have poured untold billions of dollars in R&D. It seems to me like they need to pursue patent litigation to generate some sort of ROI on all those R&D dollars.
A patent is supposed to protect a commercial product from being copied by the market. This is to promote people to share their ideas and collaborate while protecting the inventor. Patenting software concepts is counter intuitive to this process where no ingenuity of solving a problem is demonstrated. A lot of the patents that make it though now a days are really abusive of the protection and way to generalized to the technology they use.
Microsoft has been totally consistent in their rants on this topic. They are all for "Open Source" so long as they get a per copy patent royalty when it gets deployed in a shipping product. Because nobody can do anything without infringing their all encompassing patent portfolio. And they are probably right. And Linux is infringing patents held by every other tech company. Normally they just cross license between each other and little money actually changes hands, it is just a gate keeping new competitors without patents of their own to cross license at a disadvantage. Which is exactly where Linux is.
The patent system needs to be fixed. But every large company has billions invested in the current broken system AND, as noted above, depends on patents to keep new unexpected competitors from springing up.
Democrat delenda est
Looking at the pdf, it looks like Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, Mapquest, et al. are infringing on Microsoft's patent too.
When does Ford sue GM for making vehicles?
That would require someone do something cool with technology. Who is? Google may be a nice company, but web mail, craptastically feature-light "office apps", and search engines aren't exactly "cool". And who is doing anything else? (No, Apple isn't doing anything cool, either.)
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
> I'm guessing MSFT is just hoping to force a settlement, so that they can then use it as a cudgel...
MSFT is looking for the FUD quotient. Apparently, from their perspective, anything they can do towards casting doubt on OSS is a good thing.
If every OS except Windows is able to
then Windows isn't the right OS for Grandma.
I know Windows still has major market penetration in many segments of society, but Grandmas just aren't where it should be. Get 'er a Mac. Or if you'll install it for her, get her Linux.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
And anything you use to backup the GPS unit. Or update it. So, for my own experience (TomTom ONE XL), it has to be supported by FreeBSD, Mac OS X, Linux 2.6, Windows XP and Windows Vista.
What would be the point of a flash card if you couldn't take it out or update the unit anyway.
Me failed English...
FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
You jest (or at least the mods think so), but actually, you're not so far off the mark. As Windows does not come bundled with support for any file system that isn't patented by Microsoft, lording those patents over people is quite anticompetitive. Or, at the very least, more-so than the whole IE thing which started all this monopoly stuff to begin with.
Then again, the entire point of software patents is to make monopolies, so perhaps this is just what's supposed to be happening.
M$... M$... M$... M$... M$... M$... etcandsoonandsoforth
twitter? is that you?
IANAL, but if I was I'd recommend filing in the EU rather than the US, given Opera's progress there.
$ make available
As Windows does not come bundled with support for any file system that isn't patented by Microsoft, lording those patents over people is quite anticompetitive.
Well that was the whole fucking point of patents: keeping people away from your invention. Granting you a time-limited monopoly so you can capitalize on it.
Unfortunately said time limit is waaaay too long. Law does not keep up with the exponential nature of technology. That's the real problem, not what MS does with their patents.
That, and the fact that Solomon's observation that "there is nothing new under the sun" was never more apt than when applied to software.
Physical devices, with huge sunk costs in R&D and fabs make a patent a reasonable tradeoff to incentivise development.
Software, not so much.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I think what's really fucked up about this is that Microsoft is just now deciding to do something. FAT has existed for almost two decades, and the FS driver in Linux for quite some time as well. They waited for their FS to become a de facto standard so they could drop the hammer on people.
If you own a trademark you have to actively defend it, lest it become a standard term for the product type. Shouldn't technology and patents be the same way? If you allow entire industries to adopt your patented method without defending it you should lose the patent. Coming in after the fact just so you can grab your competitors by the balls is just crooked.
Good. Cheap. Fast. Pick Two.
I suspect MS has tried to push WinCE on Tomtom to replace Linux, and threatened them to sue them if they refused. These days, we see windows coming on devices where we would not expect it, and it is possible that there is some back pressure from MS.
Remember back when GIF was the number one image type on the internet? And then there was a licensing issue?
Almost killed the use of GIF as a filetype. Gave rise to the predominance of JPG and the growth of the PNG format.
I can't remember the last time I saw a gif that wasn't animated (Which seems to the be preferred small moving animatic format. For now.)
And MS make minimal profit from each EEE/XP. They make almost nothing on XP itself, and most people who buy an EEE won't install Office on it (too difficult to do, as EEEs have no CDROM drive).
If the netbook takes over a huge chunk of the computing market, watch Microsoft starve.
I shed a tear for all those who support any patent system and believe in such a system.
This sort of behavior should really help the world out in these times of recession/depression
Im so pleased i stoped using microsoft products about 8 years ago as microsoft behaves like a child sociopath most to all of the time like a troubled brother you never wanted as he has caused nothing but shame to the family.
Profile of a Sociopath
* Glibness and Superficial Charm
* Manipulative and Conning
* Grandiose Sense of Self Feels entitled to certain things as "their right."
* Pathological Lying Has no problem lying coolly and easily and it is almost impossible for them to be truthful on a consistent basis.
* Lack of Remorse, Shame or Guilt A deep seated rage, which is split off and repressed, is at their core. Does not see others around them as people, but only as targets and opportunities.
* Shallow Emotions When they show what seems to be warmth, joy, love and compassion it is more feigned than experienced and serves an ulterior motive.
* Incapacity for Love
* Need for Stimulation Living on the edge. Verbal outbursts and physical punishments are normal. Promiscuity and gambling are common.
* Callousness/Lack of Empathy Unable to empathize with the pain of their victims, having only contempt for others
* Poor Behavioral Controls/Impulsive Nature Believe they are all-powerful, all-knowing, entitled to every wish, no sense of personal boundaries, no concern for their impact on others.
* Early Behavior Problems/Juvenile Delinquency Usually has a history of behavioral and academic difficulties, yet "gets by" by conning others. Problems in making and keeping friends.
* Irresponsibility/Unreliability Not concerned about wrecking others' lives and dreams. Oblivious or indifferent to the devastation they cause. Does not accept blame themselves, but blames others, even for acts they obviously committed.
* Promiscuous Behavior/Infidelity Promiscuity, acting out of all sorts.
* Lack of Realistic Life Plan/Parasitic Lifestyle Tends to move around a lot or makes all encompassing promises for the future, poor work ethic but exploits others effectively.
* Criminal or Entrepreneurial Versatility Changes their image as needed to avoid prosecution.
= Profit ?
I assume you do not manage software projects. The assumption that software does not have a huge sunk cost is incorrect. Think about it.
Lets take an obvious example, win95 vs. win98 - three years with hundreds of developers, QA staff, tech writers, etc. (we'll assume only 100), at a low assumed price (today dollars) of say 60K each, including benefits etc., that is 3 years * 100 staff * 60K avg salary = 18 million dollars. A more realistic example might be 200-300 staff and 80-100K salary/benefits/cost (salary, benefits, heat, lights, rent, software tools, hardware, ...) getting you to something like 60-90 million dollars to produce the gold master CD/DVD. Glad you do not think that's a large R&D sunk cost.
Before you start, yes win 95/98 is way back when. That's not the point, the point is that ANY large software project has staff and that staff costs dollars (direct in salary and indirect in benefits, hardware, software, and 'cube space'). So the sunk cost for a software project R&D is AT LEAST staff * time * salary (forget, management, marketing, research, ... for now), which can add up.
I WILL AGREE that software has little per unit distribution cost. Burning another CD/DVD is cheap, but getting the first one right can be REALLY expensive. Software development is ALL about sunk cost recovered over time.
Before someone else chimes in about open source. Open source projects have the same issues/costs BUT they POTENTIALLY get subsidized (Red Hat, Ubuntu, etc. being counter examples). Developers donate time ($0 salary), work from home ($0 space/lights/heat), use personal equipment ($0 hardware) and use open source tools ($0 software). Obviously this reduces sunk cost from a cash flow perspective for projects using those 'advantages'.