"... Red Hat agrees to refrain from enforcing the infringed patent against such party for such exercise"
IANAL, but doesn't this pose a problem for the validity of RedHat's patents. My understanding is that if you refrain from enforcing a patent, then that patent becomes unenforcable. When a patent suit is litigated, if the defendant can prove that a patent holder knew of a violation of their patent and did nothing about it, then the patent becomes unenforcable and the defendant doesn't have to abide by it.
So as soon as RedHat chooses to not litigate one open source project voilating their patent, it becomes unenforcable and useless.
A more effective argument to take to your boss against this violation might be as follows:
In this senario what is to stop another company (let's say IBM for the sake of argument) from taking your company's obfuscated GPL'd code, compiling it, and selling it to your company's customers at half the cost. If a compilable form of your product is released under the GPL, you have no legal recourse to stop this.
IANAL and don't have a comment as to the legality of this, but from a business perspective, your company would be shooting themselves in the foot.
Why not just force them to spin out the Windows ME code base into a new company. That way Windows XP and Windows ME would compete head to head in the consumer and business OS market. The windows 95/98/ME code base is what they used crush competitors and Microsoft doesn't want to support that code base anyways.
If business wants a more profitable Internet, let them build it. As long as they don't try to tear down the existing Internet, I think this would be a good thing.
I have an alternate solution as to the punishment that should be levied against Microsoft. Since the violations took place leveraging Windows 95/98/ME, simply force them to spin out the code base for Windows 95/98/ME into a new company. Allow them to keep all of their other intellectual property including Window NT/2000/XP.
This would immediately create choice in the market for consumer operating systems. The established player would be the new company and Microsoft would have an uphill fight to get their OS (Microsoft XP) accepted. Presto! Instant competition in the consumer operating system market.
Slashdot Mirror
From their web page RedHat states:
"... Red Hat agrees to refrain from enforcing the infringed patent against such party for such exercise"
IANAL, but doesn't this pose a problem for the validity of RedHat's patents. My understanding is that if you refrain from enforcing a patent, then that patent becomes unenforcable. When a patent suit is litigated, if the defendant can prove that a patent holder knew of a violation of their patent and did nothing about it, then the patent becomes unenforcable and the defendant doesn't have to abide by it.
So as soon as RedHat chooses to not litigate one open source project voilating their patent, it becomes unenforcable and useless.
A more effective argument to take to your boss against this violation might be as follows:
In this senario what is to stop another company (let's say IBM for the sake of argument) from taking your company's obfuscated GPL'd code, compiling it, and selling it to your company's customers at half the cost. If a compilable form of your product is released under the GPL, you have no legal recourse to stop this.
IANAL and don't have a comment as to the legality of this, but from a business perspective, your company would be shooting themselves in the foot.
Ben
I would have been satisfied if the settlement force MS to sell their OSes to everyone at the same price.
But it doesn't even do that!
Why not just force them to spin out the Windows ME code base into a new company. That way Windows XP and Windows ME would compete head to head in the consumer and business OS market. The windows 95/98/ME code base is what they used crush competitors and Microsoft doesn't want to support that code base anyways.
:)
This way there would only be 2 MS's to hate.
If business wants a more profitable Internet, let them build it. As long as they don't try to tear down the existing Internet, I think this would be a good thing.
I have an alternate solution as to the punishment that should be levied against Microsoft. Since the violations took place leveraging Windows 95/98/ME, simply force them to spin out the code base for Windows 95/98/ME into a new company. Allow them to keep all of their other intellectual property including Window NT/2000/XP.
This would immediately create choice in the market for consumer operating systems. The established player would be the new company and Microsoft would have an uphill fight to get their OS (Microsoft XP) accepted. Presto! Instant competition in the consumer operating system market.