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Casio Paying Microsoft To Use Linux
theodp writes "Will Tux be a rainmaker for Microsoft? GeekWire reports that Microsoft has struck a deal with Casio to provide Casio's customers with coverage for their use of Linux in Casio devices. The agreement, which calls for Microsoft to receive payments of an undisclosed amount, is an implicit acknowledgment of Microsoft's longstanding claims that Linux violates its patents, an assertion that members of the open-source community have long disputed."
as long as they don't get chicks for free.
It'll be hard for them to prove so long after the fact - yes, there may be parts of device drivers that have been illegally reverse engineered, but Linux itself has stood the test of time, I think. If it really WAS infringing, the lawsuits should have been flying left and right a decade or more ago.
i translates to:
we dont use linux because its free of cost but because we believe it does a better job in the areas not protected by microsoft patents than microsoft os and believe a little overpaying in these areas is good for our customers.
"The agreement, which calls for Microsoft to receive payments of an undisclosed amount, is an implicit acknowledgment of Microsoft's longstanding claims that Linux violates its patents, an assertion that members of the open-source community have long disputed."
That is, I will grant you, possible. However, it's equally possible that Casio's signing is nothing of the kind, and rather is an acknowledgement that Microsoft's lawyers would be willing to drag a case out for long enough that it's simply cheaper to sign on the dotted line, and have the class bully go pick on somebody else.
They have been a barrier to innovation, blocking so many new technologies they've set humanity back decades. They should be split up and forced to compete on merits
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
No. Even if they are infringing, there's no point in revealing them, because the second they do that it's possible to work something out to go around them. It's better not to go with a lawsuit and milk some money year after year...
I see that Microsoft has stepped up and started doing their own Linux license shakedown.
I see a strong uptick in "$699 Linux License" trollage on this forum, except with "Microsoft" instead of "SCO" in the text.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
The article starts:
Microsoft Corp. and Casio Computer Co. Ltd. have entered into a broad, multiyear patent cross-licensing agreement that, among other things, will provide Casio’s customers with patent coverage for their use of Linux in certain Casio devices.
(emphasis mine). I would not mind betting the "other things" are actually the ones that were worth paying for, and that Microsoft slipped the "Linux patents" into the mix because Casio is using Linux. It costs Microsoft nothing but they get "precedent" with which to argue they hold valid patents affecting Linux.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
Casio is not acknowledging the validity of claims with this deal. They are acknowleding Microsoft owns numbers.
they will still pay Microsoft but don't want their software. I don't think I've read one story where these licensing fees were mention and it was brought up why they would still pay to use Linux instead of paying to use Windows.
And the income from the Linux licensing deals is still in the noise level compared to the losses of say BING, Windows Phone, and even XBox.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
read up on the Barnes and Nobel threats and you'll see how they operate. B&N told MS to tell them what patents, MS said that's proprietary information, B&N said WTF patents are public via the PTO tell us what patents, MS says only if you sign an NDA, B&N said we don't need an NDA to discuss public information, etc etc. B&N have some real lawyers while the others are cowering clueless idiots IMO. It probably helps that B&N has no connections with MS licensing since they've never sold PCs or PC software and many of the others have already been hooked by MS lawyers for other things.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
This may answer your question. From geekwire.
"Among the statements by Barnes & Noble are details of meetings between the companies "
At the meeting, Microsoft alleged that the Nook infringed six patents purportedly owned by Microsoft. Microsoft had prepared claim charts purportedly detailing the alleged infringement but insisted that it would only share the detailed claim charts if Barnes & Noble agreed to sign a non-disclosure agreement (“NDA”) that would cover the claim charts as well as all other aspects of the parties’ discussions. Noting that the patents were public and that the infringement allegations pertained to Barnes & Noble’s public product, Barnes & Noble refused to sign an NDA.
Insisting that an NDA was necessary, Microsoft discussed the alleged infringement on a high level basis only. Microsoft nevertheless maintained that it possessed patents sufficient to dominate and entirely preclude the use of the Android Operating System by the Nook. Microsoft demanded an exorbitant royalty (on a per device basis) for a license to its patent portfolio for the Nook device and at the end of the meeting Microsoft stated that it would demand an even higher per device royalty for any device that acted “more like a computer” as opposed to an eReader.
After sending the proposed license agreement, Microsoft confirmed the shockingly high licensing fees Microsoft was demanding, reiterating its exorbitant per device royalty for Nook, and for the first time demanding a royalty for Nook Color which was more than double the per device royalty Microsoft was demanding for Nook. On information and belief, the license fees demanded by Microsoft are higher than what Microsoft charges for a license to its entire operating system designed for mobile devices, Windows Phone 7.
This pretty much sums up what they are doing. They are approaching companies producing devices with Linux and threating them under NDA to sign a per-device license fee or Microsoft will sue them out of business. Thereby shutting them down.
A scenario:
Microsoft walks into a business
Microsoft: what a nice open source business you have here but this is a dangerous neighborhood, you need some protection.
Store owner: Protection? from who?
Microsoft: well from us really. If you don't pay us to use open source and Linux in particular we will sue you out of the marketplace
Microsoft: Oh and sign this NDA. You cannot talk about this to anyone... get it?
Its really sleazy egregious mobster-like behavior on the part of Microsoft. Unless the Linux developers and greater community start lobbying the government, open source and Linux as we know it is screwed.
If it really WAS infringing, the lawsuits should have been flying left and right a decade or more ago.
They seem to turn a blind eye to desktop use of Linux and go after commercial implementations embedded in devices. They also do not have a policy of using the courts first, but rather they attempt to negotiate deals like this Casio one.
My guess is that Casio wants to use long file names using FAT32.
Casio had $1.4 billion (US$) in cash reserves in April 2011 and garners over $4 billion per year in revenue.
Get out much?
"His name was James Damore."
Er, well never mind that they're not paying to use MS tech, they're paying MS not to sue them over vague IP claims, but Casio makes vast quantities of things besides digital watches — cameras, digital pianos, printers, electronic dictionaries, lots of specialized business electronics (cash registers, that kind of thing), and, yes, smart phones (running android)...
We live, as we dream -- alone....
So which ones are they then? And exactly where is the infringement?
C|N>K
One: since when is it a patent violation to come up with something that can read and write FAT and NTFS, as long as your implementation does so in a different way?
The claims of the VFAT patent appear broad enough to cover any method that successfully decodes the format used by VFAT directory entries.
Two: are those even protectable anymore?
The essential VFAT patents have been reinstated after reexamination and won't expire until at least 2016.
"shockingly high licensing fees Microsoft was demanding" and "exorbitant per device royalty" are right from the filed Barnes & Noble complaint response. The wording is somewhat inflammatory, but those are exactly the terms the used when responding to the court.
The GZone Commando looks to be running Android, at a minimum. It explicitely mentions froyo in their procedure docs for that phone.
Also, under specs, it has listed "Bing Search/Bing Maps", which makes me think that is really what these licensing fees are about. Running Bing apps on an Android device.
http://www.casiogzone.com/commando/
http://www.casiogzone.com/commando/gpl/Procedure.txt
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
That is like having to pay a hooker before you can have sex with your girl friend.
Wouldn't be surprised if this was a sweetheart deal somehow reimbursed, all to make headlines of how Casio fears Microsoft patents when using Linux.
I'm sure I'll get hate for pointing this out, but here goes: Yes Linux is infringing. So is frankly any other OS including OSX if you wanted to get technical. How do I know this? Have you SEEN their OS patent portfolio? We are talking about tens of thousands of patents! With THAT many patents it is pretty damned impossible NOT to infringe!
And someone pointed out that if MSFT were to name the patents could then be worked around and I would argue that is theoretically true but at what cost? If it takes your OS 45 steps to count 2+2 that is gonna cause your OS to take a pretty damned big hit performance wise. Using esoteric workarounds may be fine for bash scripting but we are talking about the guts of the OS here and a hell of a lot of those patents cover pretty much any straight forward way to get from point A to B. so if your OS has to go from A0 through FF and back around again just to get from A to B how badly is it gonna kill your performance?
This is why I have been arguing for years that free as in beer needs to die, to be replaced solely by free as in freedom. Even RMS says charging is just fine as long as you provide the source but free as in beer cripples the ability for Linux as a whole to fight back by building a huge patent warchest like the other big players have. The patents you are allowed access to, like IBM's, are all by companies that refuse to accept GPL V3, only GPL V2. What if they start TiVo'ing any code they use? As we have seen with Google you can't be assured because they release version A that they will release version B and I wouldn't be surprised if RMS is right and Android just ends up another iPhone, with a FOSS kernel that is worthless to FOSS because none of the stuff that will actually let you run the thing on your device is ever released.
So free as in beer really needs to go, even if it is only giving the distro $5 a release just to give them a steady income to buy patents. There is a reason why old rivals like Intel and AMD have cross licensing agreements in place, that is because they both know they infringing like mad on each other's work. But all free as in beer does is hurt those that are trying most to help! Look at Red Hat, who gives back more than any other company. did you know that nearly half the webservers out ther are running their code but they don't see a red cent? That is because a leech of a company that USED to pay Red hat for the OS they put on their devices decided they would just keep the code without giving RH back a penny, and thus CentOS was born. don't believe me, look it up. Think about how much better RH would be off, how many more coders, bug fixers, and for the purpose of this discussion how many more patents they could own if they even got 1/4th of the money for all those installs?
Like it or not money makes the world go around and he who has the gold makes the rules. To really fight something like this Linux needs a patent portfolio so damned large and scary that no company would DARE do anything other than a cross licensing agreement for fear of being crushed. How many FOSS companies like Sun or Novell will go out of business and have their patents snatched up by those that don't support FOSS? Without money you simply have no way to fight back, and free as in beer ends up a tragedy of the commons where you end up with more free riders than you do paying customers and thus ALL suffer, simply by having less resources all around. As the economy continues to sour I foresee things only getting worse on the FOSS front as companies like MSFT have guaranteed income while too many good distros and projects are dependent on the "tin cup" model which with a dead economy is gonna get less and less change in the cup. Its just human nature, if folks don't have to pay for something and money is tight then they won't.
Of course most would agree that the death of software patents should be the ultimate goal, but after Citizens United? Fat chance friend. Hell they don't have to be subtle in their bribe taking anymore!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Short version of your argument seems to be: If the bad guys has some BS patent guns, we need to have some too. There are 3 major problems with that:
1. If you use the tactics of the force you oppose, you become identical to the force you oppose. If everybody starts charging for Linux, instead of a free software ecosystem where everyone is freely giving stuff away, you have a system which, just like the proprietary world, is pay-to-play. Plus there will be endless infighting about who actually gets to own the patents, who gets the money, who ends up suing who, which consumers give money to which player, whether Debian can continue to give its stuff away even if Mandriva is charging $10 for it, etc. In other words, the Unix Wars all over again.
2. We're never going to win by opposing Microsoft or other proprietary software vendors using the same methods and tactics as they do. They have billions of dollars, thousands of patents, and lots of lawyers, and they will move quickly to prevent any effort like this from getting off the ground. Let's say you create your Linux Patent Consortium, which is a completely unified body organized on the principles you describe. They get a few patents, Microsoft realizes what they're up to and sues them out of existence, forcing them to sell of their patents to pay the damages. When opposing a force that's much more powerful than you, you have to use guerrilla tactics, which means appearing as amorphous and disorganized as possible.
3. If you have a unified consortium, with enough patents to be dangerous, but it's any kind of open election process, you will see Microsoft use its allies like Intel and it's sagans of dollars to get on the ballot and crush the organization from within, and then create proprietary alternatives that appear to be the same but are really quite different. How do we know? OLPC, that's how.
I am officially gone from