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Microsoft Patents Sudo's Behavior

Posted by timothy on from the rusty-shotgun's-right-twice-a-day dept.

Foofoobar writes "Just when you thought all was safe on the crazy patent front, Microsoft has come out of the obvious patent closet to file patent number 7617530, which basically duplicates the functionality of 'sudo' which is found in all Linux systems. PJ over at groklaw has a wonderful writeup on the entire fiasco."

15 of 657 comments (clear)

  1. Penalties by alain94040 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I don't condemn all software patents. Just because it's software doesn't mean that it can't be brilliant and stunningly innovative.

    But sudo with a GUI? A quick fix I'd suggest to get rid of those bogus patents is to have a rule that says that if a patent is proven obvious later on, then the company (Microsoft in that case) would lose all their patents for the year. That would make them think twice before filing junk...

    ---
    the Co-FoundersMeetup in Mountain View is next week

    1. Re:Penalties by fritsd · · Score: 2, Interesting

      You're using the argument that without software patents, those "inventions" would not be publically disclosed (after all, that's the trade-off, right?) So why is it that the source code of those "inventions" is not attached to the patent as proof of public disclosure? There's no technical reason whatsoever to not do this.

      --
      To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
    2. Re:Penalties by RichardJenkins · · Score: 2, Interesting

      After reading the patent, best I can tell is it's saying:

      "Sometimes an application tries to do something whilst running under a non-privileged account. If an application tries this we could use [magic] to interrupt the process and present a dialogue allowing a user to assume permissions of another account which we know has appropriate permissions [by magic]. Alternatively, we could [do magic] to determine if the user can elevate privileges of their own account, and allow them to do so."

      I'm not sure if such a system existed when this was filed in 2005 (it certainly does now, except the bits which this patent does by magic are fully fleshed out and publicly viewable in the source), but the only non-obvious part in going from the following scenario:

      rj@laptop:/$ passwd root
      passwd: You may not view or modify password information for root.
      rj@laptop:/$ sudo passwd
      [sudo] password for rj:
      Enter new UNIX password: ...to what they described is the bit which they've left to magic.

      Most tellingly: "the specific features and steps are disclosed as preferred forms of implementing the claimed invention." they're trying to steal the feature of automatic privilege escalation from anyone who wants to build it without going through MS.

    3. Re:Penalties by HungryHobo · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The problem being you can engineer your way round a patent on a specific innovative break design in a car.
      Trying to work around a patent with a flowchart with a note reading "slows car down" is pretty much impossible.

      Hence it kills innovation, not encourages it.

    4. Re:Penalties by FireFury03 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      1. Copyright
      2. Licences such as GPL, LGPL, BSD (if you want to give it away), Creative Commons, ... etc

      These things don't protect you from the things patents are _supposed_ to protect you from (namely, someone ripping off your _idea_, rather than your implementation).

      1. Proprietary software. In other words don't publish your code.

      This one will protect your idea, only if it is a hidden subsystem within your product - e.g. an algorithm which is orders of magnitude faster than existing methods of doing that job would be partly protected when integrated into proprietary software since it wouldn't be visible, but a "whole-product" idea such as Amazon's infamous one-click purchase system isn't protected because it is downright obvious how it could be implemented without needing to look at the code.

      Of course, interested parties can still reverse engineer your code anyway.

      I am sure this can easily be added to without resorting to stupid software patents, which IMHO don't contribute to innovation in developing software. The only people that stand to gain from software patents are the Lawyers and patent Trolls.

      On this we certainly agree. IMHO the whole patent system is broken and rarely does anything beneficial to innovation.

      --
      http://blog.nexusuk.org
    5. Re:Penalties by Creepy · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Actually, it is a little beyond that, otherwise it would be identical to what Apple has done since MacOS X.0. What this does different is bring up a dialog box WITH USERS that can run the application, and you can select one of those to run the app as instead, if you know the password. In a UNIX-like system this is worthless because you may have hundreds or thousands of users, but most desktop windows systems only have a handful of users at most.

      In fact, I don't think Linux (or UNIX for that matter) could even do this if it wanted to, or it'd be very ugly - it would have to check the sticky bit (and other special bits), then user, group, and role for all users to generate that list. Windows uses an ACL (Access Control List). Macs (since Tiger) and some UNIX/UNIX-likes support both UNIX permissions and ACLs which just compounds the mess. ACLs have a bit more flexibility than the UNIX bits - for instance, I could assign multiple groups and users not in those groups access permissions. I also don't have to edit /etc/passwd to do it (a root owned file) if I want to share a file with several users and don't have a container group.

  2. Kill software patents by rolfwind · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The big industry writes them up just as protection from patent trolls and then collude to keep small competition out (ie Microsoft was threatening that Linux was stepping on its patents back in the day).

    Patents were made to spawn innovation - bypassing secretive guilds by incentivizing the opening of knowledge to public domain in exchange for a limited time monopoly. Projects and society are way too fluid now to keep many inane details secret anyway. There needs to be a study of which types of patents coming in provide useful knowledge to the People, and which majority are just wastes dumps of text - and amend the system accordingly.

    I would urge the USA to do this now, while it is the leading superpower in which others follow suit. It may have been to our advantage in the past, but not so in the future, imo.

  3. Re:Stop with the alarmist headlines already by lilo_booter · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Yes, MS has applied for a patent on sudo's behaviour and that is what the title is ridiculing - as should we. Regardless of their success or failure, we're entitled to point and laugh.

  4. How is any part of that flamebait? by HangingChad · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Just because it's software doesn't mean that it can't be brilliant and stunningly innovative.

    The suggested punishment might be a little extreme, but the idea is sound. We need some kind of penalty for companies filing junk patents for the electronic equivalent of exchanging oxygen for carbon dioxide across a thin, moist membrane.

    --
    That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
  5. Seems to be describing what Ubuntu (Gnome) does by ericthughes · · Score: 3, Interesting

    when you attempt to mount a drive that is not defined in fstab. Ubuntu pops up a "enter your password" dialog. M$ maybe up to some dirty old tricks here...

  6. This IS already being done in Linux by gbutler69 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    And I'm not just talking about sudo/gksudo etc....look at "Policy Kit". This is EXACTLY what this Patent describes. EPIC FAIL Microsoft! The FREE SOFTWARE WORLD has OUT INNOVATED YOU AGAIN! Been doing this for at least more than a year. Been in design/documentation/talked about for even longer.

    --
    Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
  7. I have prior work by rkuris · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I am the original author of "priv", which came before sudo, and I didn't see any mention of it. This utility was published in Unix World back in 1987, and basically did the same thing. Does this mean "priv" is exempt from this patent?

    --
    Get rid of everything Micro and Soft: Buy Viagra and/or Linux
  8. POLICY KIT! by gbutler69 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    http://hal.freedesktop.org/docs/PolicyKit/

    --
    Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
  9. Pseudocode by failedlogic · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I think a better solution would be for the patent to be described using pseudocode or some variation thereof. Since this is afterall a software patent, the application should be written in a form that is legible to others in the field. It would also lead to easier settlement of a dispute since previous art could more easily be compared with pseudocode.

  10. Groklaw is wrong by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The claims presented on their web page do not conflict with sudo.

    sudo works in a very different way: sudo is about the user saying "i need to be a different user so I can run command Y"

    This feature is about the operating system saying "user X, in order to do Y, you need more privilege."

    The two concepts are quite different.

    Maybe Groklaw folks should use Vista/Windows7, as well as Unix, and try to understand the difference(s) between the roles of the two.