As I read the article I could think of piles of prior art. Even a search engine is offering 'software as a service' delivered through a web browser. E*trade has been offering it's stock broker software as a service for years through the web browser. It almost makes me suspect that there is more to this patent that comes across in the article. Unless they have managed to get something fundamental to offering 'web services' patented then this whole thing is worthless and will blow over like the whole One-click shopping patent.
I'd agree that section (i) says don't distribute under a 'naughty' license. I can understand that, it's their code, and if they don't want it GPL'd that's their business. What I don't understand is section (ii). So what if you use emacs/vi to edit you code? How does that in anyway effect the 'licence' status of the resulting code? It doesn't. I'm not really sure that that section of the EULA is really legal. It's certainly silly. Now MS is telling us what editor we can use to edit our code. Not that I care... I don't want their goofy little SDK anyway.
I've pretty much given up on following all of Apple's "desist from this" orders. It just goes to show how Apple is all about "style" (i.e. iMac, the "cube", the goofball colored laptops, even the 'i' infront of everthing for that matter) and is scared to death to compete on the acutal quality and usefullness of its products. Maybe they should quit touting their translucent-color ease-of-use marketing crap and make a OS where I can delete 10 files with out moving my one-button mouse a quarter of a mile. I've used the MacOS and quite frankly it's no better, and probably slightly worse than win95 (both to work with and at crashing!) Hopefully MacOS X will have a UNIX shell so Mac users can actually get something done! I suspect most slashdotters hate marketing types anyway... well just who do you think is in charge at apple?
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As I read the article I could think of piles of prior art. Even a search engine is offering 'software as a service' delivered through a web browser. E*trade has been offering it's stock broker software as a service for years through the web browser. It almost makes me suspect that there is more to this patent that comes across in the article. Unless they have managed to get something fundamental to offering 'web services' patented then this whole thing is worthless and will blow over like the whole One-click shopping patent.
I'd agree that section (i) says don't distribute under a 'naughty' license. I can understand that, it's their code, and if they don't want it GPL'd that's their business. What I don't understand is section (ii). So what if you use emacs/vi to edit you code? How does that in anyway effect the 'licence' status of the resulting code? It doesn't. I'm not really sure that that section of the EULA is really legal. It's certainly silly. Now MS is telling us what editor we can use to edit our code. Not that I care... I don't want their goofy little SDK anyway.
I've pretty much given up on following all of Apple's "desist from this" orders. It just goes to show how Apple is all about "style" (i.e. iMac, the "cube", the goofball colored laptops, even the 'i' infront of everthing for that matter) and is scared to death to compete on the acutal quality and usefullness of its products. Maybe they should quit touting their translucent-color ease-of-use marketing crap and make a OS where I can delete 10 files with out moving my one-button mouse a quarter of a mile. I've used the MacOS and quite frankly it's no better, and probably slightly worse than win95 (both to work with and at crashing!) Hopefully MacOS X will have a UNIX shell so Mac users can actually get something done! I suspect most slashdotters hate marketing types anyway... well just who do you think is in charge at apple?