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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.
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 will no doubt tread lightly because IBM and others will not tolerate them taking Linux head on... Hence, why they are trying to go around the edges. Their hope, I am assuming, is classic FUD...
Meaning, in no way will Microsoft ever be able to take on Linux directly.... Doing so would force the hand of IBM to get involved because they have much at stake...
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
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.
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.