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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."

6 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 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.

  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. 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...

  4. 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
  5. 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.