You can work around it by pulling out of the United States, leaving the country to the wolves of Microsoft. Maybe some day the US will realize their mistake in allowing software patents, but then it might possibly be too late.
Indeed the EU patent law as it is now could (and should) encourage businesses to move from the US to the EU for protection from software patent claims.
Contrary to popular belief, software patents aren't actually illegal in the EU, there is simply no union-wide policy regarding them. The EPO has granted tens of thousands of software patents, and it is up to individual member countries whether they want to enforce them or not.
Is there any evidence to suggest that the EU would - if they ever accepted software patents - wholesale recognise patents filed with the US patent office.
They wouldn't. Why should they? The EU has its own patent office, called the EPO (disregarding the fact that the set of EPO member countries isn't all the same as the set of EU member countries).
If not and they do change the law then I predict an application rush as MS and hoardes of others file EU patents for things that they do not hold US patents for. In fact it wouldn't surprise me if MS had a stack of patent applications just waiting for the green light.
The pro-software-patent EPO has already granted tens of thousands of software patents. They are just not legally enforceable in the entire union yet, though individual members may choose to enforce patents granted by the EPO. There would be no rush to the patent office, but maybe to the courts against alleged infringers.
If the EU software patent directive had been granted without amendments instead of rejected, all those patents would have come into effect at once. The currect situation stems from the rejection. That software patent proponents actually voted for rejection is because a grant with amendments could have made software patents entirely illegal, which they perceived as too risky.
That's the great thing about companies with names like "IP Innovation LLC"....they don't have any products so they can't possibly be infringing on anybody else's junk patents.
They may not have their own products, but like everybody else they are certainly users of technology. Someone should probably be able to find an infringement somewhere, but of course such a countersuit might be taken over by the vendor of the infringing product, such as Microsoft.
Does anyone doubt that Microsoft is the real party in interest?
How can anyone doubt when this comes just days after Steve Ballmer warns against patent trolls coming after F/OSS? This seems like too much of a coincidence for my taste.
Even worse than that is the situation for freely distributed Linux, obviously there's no one to pay licence fees to use the patent so it's possible that restrictions would somehow be placed on such free distributions (not sure of the legal situation with one).
According to my reading of the GPL, no restriction can be added. If you cannot simultaneously abide by the GPL and a decision by a court, you cannot distribute at all (frequently known as the liberty or death clause).
That's a common answer, but it is completely useless. Yes, using the rpm command was a chore because of dependency hell, but now we have Yum, which resolves and downloads dependencies as necessary, just like Apt. Now, what is the problem with RPM again?
To me, the "bad rpm, good apt" argument seems more like a mindless drone argument than anything else.
They said they belong to a consortium of companies (including IBM) who have pooled software patents for defensive purposes (I can't remember the name of the group, I want to say it's the Public Patent Foundation (www.pubpat.org) but that doesn't appear to be it).
The name you are looking for is the Open Invention Network, which is backed by such small-time players as Google, IBM, NEC, Novell, Philips, Red Hat and Sony.
Moreover, because of the "instrumentation" built into Vista, Microsoft knows what problems people are facing, what drivers are missing and what application compatibility problems they are having, he said.
Vista is NOT harder to use than XP. It's virtually the same, especially from the point of view of a non-power user.
I tried to turn on File and Printer Sharing in Vista, and after about one minute of waiting, it said that it couldn't do it. No explanation why. Tried it again with the same result. XP just does it, in about one second.
1. Games. Other than Urban Terror, pretty much any game I have tried in Linux is crap, or runs kind of crappily under wine. There are some emulators, so you can have decent games, but most of them don't work very well out of box, and are ludicrously difficult to set up.
This is a well-known catch-22. The game houses don't care about Linux since there are compatably few users, and gamers don't care since there are so few commercial games. It is still an open question how to solve this problem.
The obvious answer would be at least one marvelous game that is only available on Linux. How to accomplish this is another matter though. Commercial game houses won't do this for the reasons stated above, and open source games (just like other open source applications) tend to become ported to Windows even if they originally were developed for Linux.
2. 3d audio. I'm assuming there's a way to do it. Good luck figuring it out
4. Ease of Use. I'm not saying Ubuntu hasn't made strides, it has, the new version even more so, but there are still plenty of common tasks that are very difficult and shouldn't be.
Care to list a few examples?
7. Microsoft Office.
Won't happen, probably forever. Keeping Microsoft Office on Windows is one of the ways people are kept on that platform. Unless Linux gets a significant double-digit market share, then Microsoft might port an outdated version of Office to Linux, just as they do with Office for Mac.
8. a hegemony. Linux is going to have to be better, faster, easier, and backwards compatible before "The Year of Desktop Linux" happens.
I'm afraid that it will also have to be able to run Windows programs without Wine, have DirectX 15 support before Microsoft implements it, scrap all security features so that people won't have those nagging requests for the root password, etc. In essence, people are so locked into Windows that Linux must become Windows before the unwashed masses will even consider it.
Please Linux developers, unify the OS and create something that at least 90% of the computing population can accomplish something on, not just the brainy and overwhelmingly patient.
Those 90% of the general population want to run Windows software and won't accept Wine or a virtual machine. They want to double-click on the.exe, click-drool-click, and do their thing. Making it user-friendly is not enough, they have to be able to run their pirated copies of Photoshop and 3D Studio, not to mention all their pirated DirectX 10 games.
Without some massive reeducation program, I doubt that Linux will get a significant market share in the next several decades. People have Microsoft in their heads, and love what they get from Steve the monkey boy, regardless of how well it works. It's just like the instability of the Windows 9X line, as well as preceding products. People thought that occasional crashes were just facts of life if you wanted to use a computer.
SCO spent some measly millions on their lawsuits. Microsoft has more than 50 billion dollars in the bank. They could drag their legs for a century and still be in business.
You can't work around a patent by implementing the same thing differently
That depends entirely on the patent. Many patents are concept patents, and those would not allow a different implementation. There are also algorithm patents, which would allow an implementation that does not use the patented algorithm.
Isn't there a law to force Ballmer to put up or shut up? Is it possible to go to court to have him clear the air instead of damaging Linux's progress? lawyers please clarify.
IANAL, but I think that someone affected by Microsoft's claims could sue Microsoft and request a declaratory judgement that their software does not infringe Microsoft's patents.
Some of the play mechanics from Call to Power would be nice to appropriate in a future Civ game too, like the civil engineering pool. Moving around armies of engineer units is a tedious mechanic that deserved to die.
I completely agree. That's why when I play Civ, I play CivCTP, and not the mainstream Civ games. The armies of automated engineers that often endlessly run around in circles until the game logic decides that it has hit an infinite loop are irritating as hell. I much prefer the public works concept of CivCTP.
European directive never passed (and EPO has a strict policy)
The EPO has a very strict policy of granting every software patent applied for, valid or not. It also has a policy of lobbying for software patents in the EU.
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You can work around it by pulling out of the United States, leaving the country to the wolves of Microsoft. Maybe some day the US will realize their mistake in allowing software patents, but then it might possibly be too late.
Contrary to popular belief, software patents aren't actually illegal in the EU, there is simply no union-wide policy regarding them. The EPO has granted tens of thousands of software patents, and it is up to individual member countries whether they want to enforce them or not.
They wouldn't. Why should they? The EU has its own patent office, called the EPO (disregarding the fact that the set of EPO member countries isn't all the same as the set of EU member countries).
If not and they do change the law then I predict an application rush as MS and hoardes of others file EU patents for things that they do not hold US patents for. In fact it wouldn't surprise me if MS had a stack of patent applications just waiting for the green light.The pro-software-patent EPO has already granted tens of thousands of software patents. They are just not legally enforceable in the entire union yet, though individual members may choose to enforce patents granted by the EPO. There would be no rush to the patent office, but maybe to the courts against alleged infringers.
If the EU software patent directive had been granted without amendments instead of rejected, all those patents would have come into effect at once. The currect situation stems from the rejection. That software patent proponents actually voted for rejection is because a grant with amendments could have made software patents entirely illegal, which they perceived as too risky.
They may not have their own products, but like everybody else they are certainly users of technology. Someone should probably be able to find an infringement somewhere, but of course such a countersuit might be taken over by the vendor of the infringing product, such as Microsoft.
How can anyone doubt when this comes just days after Steve Ballmer warns against patent trolls coming after F/OSS? This seems like too much of a coincidence for my taste.
According to my reading of the GPL, no restriction can be added. If you cannot simultaneously abide by the GPL and a decision by a court, you cannot distribute at all (frequently known as the liberty or death clause).
That's a common answer, but it is completely useless. Yes, using the rpm command was a chore because of dependency hell, but now we have Yum, which resolves and downloads dependencies as necessary, just like Apt. Now, what is the problem with RPM again?
To me, the "bad rpm, good apt" argument seems more like a mindless drone argument than anything else.
I hear that argument about once a week on average, but yet nobody has been able to explain what their problem with RPM is. Would you like to try?
AFAIK, Red Hat substituted Up2Date for Yum in RHEL 5.
They couldn't sue over patents, because they had none. A while after the IBM suit was filed, they received their first patent.
The name you are looking for is the Open Invention Network, which is backed by such small-time players as Google, IBM, NEC, Novell, Philips, Red Hat and Sony.
From the article:
Moreover, because of the "instrumentation" built into Vista, Microsoft knows what problems people are facing, what drivers are missing and what application compatibility problems they are having, he said.Does that mean what I think it means?
I tried to turn on File and Printer Sharing in Vista, and after about one minute of waiting, it said that it couldn't do it. No explanation why. Tried it again with the same result. XP just does it, in about one second.
What is nVidia doing that they didn't do before? Did I miss any news?
This is a well-known catch-22. The game houses don't care about Linux since there are compatably few users, and gamers don't care since there are so few commercial games. It is still an open question how to solve this problem.
The obvious answer would be at least one marvelous game that is only available on Linux. How to accomplish this is another matter though. Commercial game houses won't do this for the reasons stated above, and open source games (just like other open source applications) tend to become ported to Windows even if they originally were developed for Linux.
2. 3d audio. I'm assuming there's a way to do it. Good luck figuring it outThe answer is called OpenAL.
4. Ease of Use. I'm not saying Ubuntu hasn't made strides, it has, the new version even more so, but there are still plenty of common tasks that are very difficult and shouldn't be.Care to list a few examples?
7. Microsoft Office.Won't happen, probably forever. Keeping Microsoft Office on Windows is one of the ways people are kept on that platform. Unless Linux gets a significant double-digit market share, then Microsoft might port an outdated version of Office to Linux, just as they do with Office for Mac.
8. a hegemony. Linux is going to have to be better, faster, easier, and backwards compatible before "The Year of Desktop Linux" happens.I'm afraid that it will also have to be able to run Windows programs without Wine, have DirectX 15 support before Microsoft implements it, scrap all security features so that people won't have those nagging requests for the root password, etc. In essence, people are so locked into Windows that Linux must become Windows before the unwashed masses will even consider it.
Those 90% of the general population want to run Windows software and won't accept Wine or a virtual machine. They want to double-click on the .exe, click-drool-click, and do their thing. Making it user-friendly is not enough, they have to be able to run their pirated copies of Photoshop and 3D Studio, not to mention all their pirated DirectX 10 games.
Without some massive reeducation program, I doubt that Linux will get a significant market share in the next several decades. People have Microsoft in their heads, and love what they get from Steve the monkey boy, regardless of how well it works. It's just like the instability of the Windows 9X line, as well as preceding products. People thought that occasional crashes were just facts of life if you wanted to use a computer.
AFAIK, Xen is several orders of magnitude more complicated than KVM and Lguest. That is probably why it takes time to merge.
Then why not go Microsoft all the way and swap PHP for ASP.NET?
I think that he was referring to this cluster market. Windows has 0.4% and Linux has 77.8% of that market.
I'm pretty sure that the human rights charter do not apply to corporations.
SCO spent some measly millions on their lawsuits. Microsoft has more than 50 billion dollars in the bank. They could drag their legs for a century and still be in business.
That depends entirely on the patent. Many patents are concept patents, and those would not allow a different implementation. There are also algorithm patents, which would allow an implementation that does not use the patented algorithm.
IANAL, but I think that someone affected by Microsoft's claims could sue Microsoft and request a declaratory judgement that their software does not infringe Microsoft's patents.
I completely agree. That's why when I play Civ, I play CivCTP, and not the mainstream Civ games. The armies of automated engineers that often endlessly run around in circles until the game logic decides that it has hit an infinite loop are irritating as hell. I much prefer the public works concept of CivCTP.
The EPO has a very strict policy of granting every software patent applied for, valid or not. It also has a policy of lobbying for software patents in the EU.