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Microsoft Patents the Crippling of Operating Systems
theodp writes "On Tuesday, Microsoft was granted US Patent No. 7,536,726 (it was filed in 2005) for intentionally crippling the functionality of an operating system by 'making selected portions and functionality of the operating system unavailable to the user or by limiting the user's ability to add software applications or device drivers to the computer' until an 'agreed upon sum of money' is paid to 'unlock or otherwise make available the restricted functionality.' According to Microsoft, this solves a 'problem inherent in open architecture systems,' i.e., 'they are generally licensed with complete use rights and/or functionality that may be beyond the need or desire of the system purchaser.' An additional problem with open architecture systems, Microsoft explains, is that 'virtually anyone can write an application that can be executed on the system.' Nice to see the USPTO rewarding Microsoft's eight problem-solving inventors, including Linux killer (and antelope killer) Joachim Kempin, who's been credited with getting Microsoft hauled into federal court on antitrust charges." Sounds like the mechanism by which Microsoft sells one version of Vista to all users, and lets users upgrade to higher-tier flavors of the OS after cash changes hands.
I'd think there would be plenty of prior art, especially in the more general "software" category.
Shareware for one.
There was also a "windows 3.x" shell clone back in the day that was also distributed as shareware and I think that limited some functionality.
Crap...can't remember the name of it...Geo something (sadly...I've been feeling nostalgic and been reading up on old game consoles so the only terms that comes to mind...is neo geo...d'oh)
What about the Amiga system....the OS was on a chip...and you had to pay to get it or you just had a "limited" (VERY) functioning computer...(more like a big paperweight).
I'm sure there have been some other lesser known operating systems in the crevices of history that had this "limited functionality" (shareware) mentality.
I suppose they're doing us a service with this patent. Now no one else can deliberately cripple their operating system. I suppose their motive was for that Max-3-Apps thing in the starter versions of 7.
signature is pants
DEC Unix (aka DEC OSF/1 AXP, Compaq/HP Tru64 Unix) has done this since day one (and IIRC VMS did it before that). You have to enter License PAKs to get all kinds of functionality, including multi-user logins, development tools, cluster support, and AdvFS filesystem utilities.
I suppose they're doing us a service with this patent. Now no one else can deliberately cripple their operating system. I suppose their motive was for that Max-3-Apps thing in the starter versions of 7.
And didn't Vista have similar functionality?
I'm very surprised that this got through. I believe I'm staring at pieces of prior art in the form of a pair of Hypervisors which 'unlock' features after entering a key (stating that I purchased it). These happen to compete against Microsoft's Hyper-V...
I don't think that any real action will come of this particular patent. It smells to me like they're trying to justify some sort of innovation quota. I really can't see this being enforceable at all... But, I'm not the one arguing this in court either.
They just gave it a name: "Method and technique for getting user to pay money to continue accessing their data".
If you received a phone call using this technique, the FBI would call it a ransom demand...
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
This isn't just useful for stopping piracy, this is useful by the Feds and the NSA who deal with botnets and foreign agents hacking government agencies. They can send triggers to those machines to disable them. Of course this creates a customer support nightmare but as far as the NSA and Microsoft are concerned, they will just tell everyone they need to buy antivirus from Microsoft or purhcase a new computer from Dell.
It's a win-win for Microsoft and the feds. And that's all that anyone who will prosecute them cares about.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
This isn't limited to software either. Here's one I'm just familiar with:
the YJ Jeep (years 88-96) came with the option of a 19 gallon gas tank. Standard was ~12 gallons. They found it was cheaper to make one gas tank and the standard one had a tube attached to it that would make the pump think it was full at 12 gallons. You can get around this by "topping off" for several minutes while you pump another 7 gallons into a full tank, or you can disassemble the inlet and remove the tube, (about 2" round 8" long) from just under the inlet area. By not taking the upgrade you are actually getting more parts.
PS. if you own one of these jeeps and want to do it google for it you should be able to find a nice pictorial howto
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
A LOOOONG time ago,I bought a $19.95 4 function Radio Shack Calculator. RS had a similar calculator with additional memory functions for an extra $20. By cutting holes in the case, I gained access to the memory function keys, thus saving 50%.
Now no one else can deliberately cripple their operating system. I suppose their motive was for that Max-3-Apps thing in the starter versions of 7.
As others are no doubt pointing out, anyone who wants to challenge this in court can find lots of prior art. In the case of the limit to the number of running apps, this is quite similar to the gimmick that was in Sys/V unix two decades ago, which limited the number of simultaneous logins to 2 unless you paid them extra to change the byte that held the limit.
Back around 1990 or so, I had a bit of fun with them. Due to problems diagnosing remote login problems, I wrote a login-like program which basically had the same functionality, but it had extensive builtin logging, so you could find out why a login was failing. The program worked as a drop-in replacement for the standard login program, but it missed one feature: It didn't honor the 2-user login limit. When users "complained" (heh!) about this, I pointed out (publicly in several forums) that I'd omitted it because I didn't know where the login limit was stored. I said that if the AT&T folks would tell me where it was hidden, I could add support for the login limit.
For some reason, we never heard from them, and I was never able to add that feature. They probably figured out that I'd add it as an explicit command-line option, making it trivial for users to disable it if they liked. Also, they probably figured out that, since my program was open-source, anyone would be able to read my code to find out where the login limit was kept, and write their own little program to overwrite that byte.
In any case, I worked on a number of projects where this stupid limit was one of the listed reasons for not using Sys/V as our platform. We generally thought that delivering a system so crippled and demanding money to fix it was simply tacky, and not something that we wanted to do to our customers. Sometimes I wonder what happened to Sys/V; I haven't seen it in years, and I don't recall reading of it being retired. Of course, it lives on as POSIX, more or less, but the implementations don't use any AT&T (or SCO?) code, so we don't see such limit in the unix part of the industry any more.
(Or do we? Are some vendors still doing such tacky things to their customers? Other than Microsoft, of course.)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.