Not quite. They're claiming IBM put the code in, and are now removing it to try to hide their infringement.
If they put it in and didn't publish it, then they didn't infringe, since they have a license.
If they put it in and did publish it, then directing a limited set of developers won't help with destroying evidence, since the code will be on thousands of web sites and on CD ROMs.
A politician can get away with giving big biz what they want by picking popular social issues such as gay marriage.
Well, then that issue is more important to voters than health care, education, fiscal responsibility, peace, or security. So, they are getting what they want.
Those voters may be stupid, they may regret their choice 10-20 years later, or they may never figure out what hit them (just like many US voters haven't figured out how US policies that voters voted for in the 50's and 60's are largely responsible for Middle Eastern terrorism today), but they are still adults that are responsible for their actions and the consequences.
But we are building up a huge trade bubble which risks a big crash, worse than the dot-com crash that put many of us on the streets. We party it up when free trade is good to us, but when the hangover hits, we change our toon.
Of course. But people prefer partying and demonstrating their military might to paying for education, research, and meaningful infrastructure.
Most voters are ambivalent. It is favors to biz lobbyists, not voter demand that keeps them going.
Lobbyists don't vote, voters do. And voters have been clear: they elect politicians that keep cheap oil and cheap imports coming, politicians that cut public funding for research and education, and politicians that start wars. And they have been doing that in both parties.
I only hope this trade defict policy actually manages to sustain our standard of living and low inflation in the medium and long term.
It will not--it's unsustainable. Over this century, there will be an equilibration of living standards across the US, Europe, China, and India. So, the best we can do is help those nations develop quickly and try to engineer a soft landing.
Why we continue to give away jobs to a big communist cheater and run up a big bubble-risky trade deficit with them, I'll never know.
That's a legitimate question, and the answer is pretty simple: because the US standard of living and low inflation rate depend on cheap Chinese imports, as well as a commitment to free trade. Furthermore, China owns significant parts of the US (how do you think the trade deficit is paid for?).
That's why voters keep voting for parties that promise to keep the current trade policy going. It's really just the same irresponsible behavior the majority of Americans display with their personal credit cards, and sooner or later, it ends in bankruptcy, or at least really hard times.
Driving down the cost of disk storage to $0.50/G requires real R&D. It's also a self-protecting market: the 2-3 years that a company may have an advantage in this area, it gets, without patents, simply from the expertise that they have and nobody else does.
The latest "brand name designs" rarely if ever contain any innovation beyond taking advantage of the latest smaller battery or whatever; what companies are trying to recoup there is not R&D, but advertising.
You keep making arguments based on technical quality; it doesn't matter how good KDE is, at $3000/commercial developer and under the control of Troll Tech, it simply isn't a viable choice for any OS vendor to ship as the default desktop environment. Companies would be shipping Tcl/Tk instead of Qt if that were the only choice.
So, if you think that Gnome has problems, go contribute and help fix them, because Gnome is likely going to be the only game in town in the long term, unless someone re-implements Qt under a more liberal license and fights the resulting copyright infringement lawsuit from Troll Tech.
(As for Solaris sucking, yes it does. Replacing Sun's user software with GNU and X11 has a tradition as long as Sun itself, and doubtlessly Sun manages to break Gnome as well. Heck, people even had to replace AWT and Swing with SWT. However, what matters here is not Sun's lack of engineering skill, but their choices as a commercial vendor, which are rational and in-line with other commercial vendors.)
4/6 brands (Ubuntu, Red Hat, Eclipse, Suse) you mention would not be burdened with the financial cost of Qt if they chose to develop with it
Indeed, they wouldn't. But they would ensure that every single one of their commercial customers would be forced to buy a Troll Tech software license if the customers wants to do native desktop development. So, their proposition to commercial customers would be "hey, move to Linux and pay $3000/developer just for the toolkit". Of course, they couldn't even say that because the price of Qt is totally out of their control: Troll Tech could jack up the prices again, whenever they feel like it.
In contrast, for Windows and Macintosh, writing commercial software using their toolkits is free: you don't have to pay a dime to develop commercial for MFC,.NET, or Cocoa. You even get reasonable development environments for free with them, and you get >90% market share to deliver your desktop applications to.
With $3000/developer on Linux and $0/developer on Windows and Macintosh, Linux would be at a grave disadvantage among commercial developers. Furthermore, any OS vendor would be a complete fool to give control over something as important as the desktop toolkit away to some company that can arbitrarily change prices or licensing terms.
You may also find that many people use Qt for closed source development anyways, despite the financial cost associated with it.
Many people also drive Porsches; that doesn't make requiring a Porsche in order to get on the road a good idea, much as the manufacturer of Porsches might like such a requirement.
First, since we're never going to get it quite right, we need to decide whether we want to err on the side of sometimes giving out invalid patents, or whether we want to err on the side of sometimes not giving out patents that perhaps ought to be valid.
I think it's pretty clear that we want to err on the side of sometimes not giving out patents that perhaps ought to be valid. After that, it follows fairly simply that the standard for unobviousness should be pretty high, and that demonstrating obviousness should be fairly easy.
So in a way, Ubuntu is directly using software developed by Microsoft.
That's total bullshit and pure FUD. I guess now that they've run out of technical arguments, the KDE zealots are changing their strategy and spreading FUD about licenses.
KDE is the obvious environment to use instead of GNOME.
KDE is a non-starter for commercial desktop environments because of the cost of Qt for commercial users: that's why Sun, IBM, Ubuntu, RedHat, Eclipse, and SuSE are all basing their major products on Gtk+, not Qt.
Of course, Linux (both the kernel and the user space) "infringes" on many Microsoft's patents, as does just about every piece of software in existence, commercial or open source. How could it not? Microsoft has, after all, obtained patents on things that were published in open source software before Microsoft even filed the patent.
The real questions are whether Linux infringes on any valid Microsoft patents, and whether Microsoft's threats have any legal significance. That seems pretty unlikely: unlike Microsoft, open source developers tend to be scrupulous about avoiding patent infringement. That means that there is going to be no willful infringement and no patent infringement for any key patents. Or, in different words, Microsoft would have a hard time getting anything more than an apology and a quick code change. How they're going to get any business deals out of that, I fail to see.
So, Microsoft, please let us get this over with and start suing.
Our lives have become safer than any time in history; what the hell do we need this stuff for? While the occasional murder or terrorist attack is sad and tragic, we could save far more lives by spending this money on public health.
In addition to not giving us much bang for the buck, there is a grave risk that all this surveillance technology will be used by people to undermine our democracy.
Your argument doesn't work. Software patents have been asserted many times successfully against commercial competitors, so they definitely are valid and enforceable. People simply have failed to make them stick in any meaningful way against open source software, and it's not for lack of trying. Over the last decade or so, we have had several major companies assert significant patent claims against open source software, and they all have come to essentially nothing.
Just for reference the UK has the largest concentration of Michelin starred restaurants anywhere in the world right now including France.
I suppose that settles the matter for you if you are the kind of person that thinks that a mass-market French paperback tourist guide defines what good dining is.
and I nearly got thrown out of a place for correcting the waiter on the pronunciation of the wine Merlot (it's Mer-loh).
Mainly what that tells us is that you're an uncivilized lout; no reasonable person would stoop to engaging in discussions about French pronunciation with a waiter.
I think the FSF could not have wished for a better means by which to illustrate the importance of GPLv3. Prior to this, free software developers, even those who have been using the GPL in the past, have been somewhat undecided about GPLv3. I think the Microsoft-Novell deal makes it pretty clear that the GPLv2 has loopholes that need to be addressed.
If you live in a highly litigious country and you make your living doing something which might be cross to Microsoft's purposes they could sue you whether they have grounds to do so or not
And, in that case, it still doesn't matter whether you use Linux or not because, as you say yourself, Microsoft can sue you anyway.
We aren't talking about credit, we're talking about control. And the FSF controls a lot of the software that ships with Linux, and they will continue to do so as long as they are doing a good job.
Look at it this way: Microsoft paid Novell $240m and gave them a license to their patents. Novell didn't even admit patent infringement, but even if they did, so what? If someone gives me $240m and a license, I'll take the deal--there is no downside.
The Microsoft-Novell deal is meaningless except as a PR stunt. And even at that, it looks like it's backfiring.
The only problem with the deal is that people like you keep spreading FUD based on it, positing risks and possibilities that are completely unrealistic. I don't know whether you actually work for Microsoft, but you might as well.
There are several Linux distros for Mac hardware, just install one of those. I'd give regular Ubuntu a choice, and if that's too heavy-weight, try Xubuntu.
Ubuntu comes with a lot of software pre-installed, it feels a lot more responsive than OS X on the same hardware, and it has very much a Mac-like feel. I'm running it on an old iMac and have been quite happy with it.
Give the man a cookie. Finally, someone who actually understands the purpose of patents. The whole deal, here, is that, in the past, people just kept their inventions secret if they could. The end result? Techniques could die with their inventor (read about Damascus steel for a great example of this). And, as you say, meanwhile people have to duplicate the effort.
And where is the evidence that the system is working? In practice, it looks like companies are primarily using software patents to protect (1) things they have to disclose anyway as part of doing business, (2) application areas without actually disclosing how to do anything, and (3) ideas that are basically just straightforward engineering.
Patent protection keeps other people from using their own ideas and the results of their own labor. That is something extraordinary, and it should require extraordinary evidence to keep it in place. So far, software patent proponents have provided not a shred of evidence that software patents are beneficial.
An outright "No Software Patents" stance would say that any company could then duplicate the oil company's unique software, leaving them no protection for their massive investment and intellectual property.
Sure: they can keep it a trade secret. In fact, that's what they're going to be doing anyway, while only disclosing patents that are so vague as to be useless when the patent protection runs out.
If we remove all software patents, we also remove part of the incentive for large corporations to invest in software.
Most of the great software inventions we use today were developed long before software patents even existed. And most software today would be developed whether or not it is patentable, including the oil company software you mention above, because companies don't have a choice.
Your argument is as stupid as if you were trying to argue that companies wouldn't have customer service or send invoices or pay bill unless they can patent the methods to do so. Of course they'd do all those things, simply because they have to do in order to do business.
It makes little difference what the text of the Novell deal with Microsoft says. Microsoft paid a net of several hundred million dollars to Novell. With that, it is pointless for Microsoft to argue that Novell paid money to license Microsoft's patents. Heck, if Microsoft pays me $240m, I'll go a step further and actually admit to infringing on Microsoft's patents, provided Microsoft gives me the same perpetual license they have given Novell.
Microsoft can pay other people to sign contracts until their bank account is empty and it's meaningless. The only thing that means anything at all (and even then, not much) is if someone admits patent infringement and then pays Microsoft a substantial net amount of money to license the patent.
These guys deserve to get paid for such a beautiful and consistent API, unlike Microsoft and much of the free software out there.
What kind of fairy-tale land do you live in? Why do you think Qt is as mature as it is? It's because of the feedback and contributions from large numbers of open source developers. If the KDE guys hadn't wasted their time on Troll Tech's software and instead rallied around Gtk, Gtk would be as "beautiful and consistent" as Qt.
Software gets valuable by being used, and Troll Tech has gotten many times their value back compared to what they have made available. It's been a lousy deal for users.
But that does not mean Qt is not the best toolkit there is, or that money spent on it are not well spent.
Neither Gtk nor Qt are "the best toolkit there is" by a long shot.
And even if you limit yourself to C++ toolkits, Qt simply isn't worth the extra money compared to free alternatives like Gtkmm and wxWidgets.
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Not quite. They're claiming IBM put the code in, and are now removing it to try to hide their infringement.
If they put it in and didn't publish it, then they didn't infringe, since they have a license.
If they put it in and did publish it, then directing a limited set of developers won't help with destroying evidence, since the code will be on thousands of web sites and on CD ROMs.
Lots of companies scan their incoming mail in their mail rooms; this company is simply providing an outsourcing option for that kind of service.
A politician can get away with giving big biz what they want by picking popular social issues such as gay marriage.
Well, then that issue is more important to voters than health care, education, fiscal responsibility, peace, or security. So, they are getting what they want.
Those voters may be stupid, they may regret their choice 10-20 years later, or they may never figure out what hit them (just like many US voters haven't figured out how US policies that voters voted for in the 50's and 60's are largely responsible for Middle Eastern terrorism today), but they are still adults that are responsible for their actions and the consequences.
But we are building up a huge trade bubble which risks a big crash, worse than the dot-com crash that put many of us on the streets. We party it up when free trade is good to us, but when the hangover hits, we change our toon.
Of course. But people prefer partying and demonstrating their military might to paying for education, research, and meaningful infrastructure.
Most voters are ambivalent. It is favors to biz lobbyists, not voter demand that keeps them going.
Lobbyists don't vote, voters do. And voters have been clear: they elect politicians that keep cheap oil and cheap imports coming, politicians that cut public funding for research and education, and politicians that start wars. And they have been doing that in both parties.
I only hope this trade defict policy actually manages to sustain our standard of living and low inflation in the medium and long term.
It will not--it's unsustainable. Over this century, there will be an equilibration of living standards across the US, Europe, China, and India. So, the best we can do is help those nations develop quickly and try to engineer a soft landing.
Why we continue to give away jobs to a big communist cheater and run up a big bubble-risky trade deficit with them, I'll never know.
That's a legitimate question, and the answer is pretty simple: because the US standard of living and low inflation rate depend on cheap Chinese imports, as well as a commitment to free trade. Furthermore, China owns significant parts of the US (how do you think the trade deficit is paid for?).
That's why voters keep voting for parties that promise to keep the current trade policy going. It's really just the same irresponsible behavior the majority of Americans display with their personal credit cards, and sooner or later, it ends in bankruptcy, or at least really hard times.
Driving down the cost of disk storage to $0.50/G requires real R&D. It's also a self-protecting market: the 2-3 years that a company may have an advantage in this area, it gets, without patents, simply from the expertise that they have and nobody else does.
The latest "brand name designs" rarely if ever contain any innovation beyond taking advantage of the latest smaller battery or whatever; what companies are trying to recoup there is not R&D, but advertising.
You keep making arguments based on technical quality; it doesn't matter how good KDE is, at $3000/commercial developer and under the control of Troll Tech, it simply isn't a viable choice for any OS vendor to ship as the default desktop environment. Companies would be shipping Tcl/Tk instead of Qt if that were the only choice.
So, if you think that Gnome has problems, go contribute and help fix them, because Gnome is likely going to be the only game in town in the long term, unless someone re-implements Qt under a more liberal license and fights the resulting copyright infringement lawsuit from Troll Tech.
(As for Solaris sucking, yes it does. Replacing Sun's user software with GNU and X11 has a tradition as long as Sun itself, and doubtlessly Sun manages to break Gnome as well. Heck, people even had to replace AWT and Swing with SWT. However, what matters here is not Sun's lack of engineering skill, but their choices as a commercial vendor, which are rational and in-line with other commercial vendors.)
4/6 brands (Ubuntu, Red Hat, Eclipse, Suse) you mention would not be burdened with the financial cost of Qt if they chose to develop with it
.NET, or Cocoa. You even get reasonable development environments for free with them, and you get >90% market share to deliver your desktop applications to.
Indeed, they wouldn't. But they would ensure that every single one of their commercial customers would be forced to buy a Troll Tech software license if the customers wants to do native desktop development. So, their proposition to commercial customers would be "hey, move to Linux and pay $3000/developer just for the toolkit". Of course, they couldn't even say that because the price of Qt is totally out of their control: Troll Tech could jack up the prices again, whenever they feel like it.
In contrast, for Windows and Macintosh, writing commercial software using their toolkits is free: you don't have to pay a dime to develop commercial for MFC,
With $3000/developer on Linux and $0/developer on Windows and Macintosh, Linux would be at a grave disadvantage among commercial developers. Furthermore, any OS vendor would be a complete fool to give control over something as important as the desktop toolkit away to some company that can arbitrarily change prices or licensing terms.
You may also find that many people use Qt for closed source development anyways, despite the financial cost associated with it.
Many people also drive Porsches; that doesn't make requiring a Porsche in order to get on the road a good idea, much as the manufacturer of Porsches might like such a requirement.
First, since we're never going to get it quite right, we need to decide whether we want to err on the side of sometimes giving out invalid patents, or whether we want to err on the side of sometimes not giving out patents that perhaps ought to be valid.
I think it's pretty clear that we want to err on the side of sometimes not giving out patents that perhaps ought to be valid. After that, it follows fairly simply that the standard for unobviousness should be pretty high, and that demonstrating obviousness should be fairly easy.
So in a way, Ubuntu is directly using software developed by Microsoft.
That's total bullshit and pure FUD. I guess now that they've run out of technical arguments, the KDE zealots are changing their strategy and spreading FUD about licenses.
KDE is the obvious environment to use instead of GNOME.
KDE is a non-starter for commercial desktop environments because of the cost of Qt for commercial users: that's why Sun, IBM, Ubuntu, RedHat, Eclipse, and SuSE are all basing their major products on Gtk+, not Qt.
Of course, Linux (both the kernel and the user space) "infringes" on many Microsoft's patents, as does just about every piece of software in existence, commercial or open source. How could it not? Microsoft has, after all, obtained patents on things that were published in open source software before Microsoft even filed the patent.
The real questions are whether Linux infringes on any valid Microsoft patents, and whether Microsoft's threats have any legal significance. That seems pretty unlikely: unlike Microsoft, open source developers tend to be scrupulous about avoiding patent infringement. That means that there is going to be no willful infringement and no patent infringement for any key patents. Or, in different words, Microsoft would have a hard time getting anything more than an apology and a quick code change. How they're going to get any business deals out of that, I fail to see.
So, Microsoft, please let us get this over with and start suing.
Our lives have become safer than any time in history; what the hell do we need this stuff for? While the occasional murder or terrorist attack is sad and tragic, we could save far more lives by spending this money on public health.
In addition to not giving us much bang for the buck, there is a grave risk that all this surveillance technology will be used by people to undermine our democracy.
Your argument doesn't work. Software patents have been asserted many times successfully against commercial competitors, so they definitely are valid and enforceable. People simply have failed to make them stick in any meaningful way against open source software, and it's not for lack of trying. Over the last decade or so, we have had several major companies assert significant patent claims against open source software, and they all have come to essentially nothing.
Just for reference the UK has the largest concentration of Michelin starred restaurants anywhere in the world right now including France.
I suppose that settles the matter for you if you are the kind of person that thinks that a mass-market French paperback tourist guide defines what good dining is.
and I nearly got thrown out of a place for correcting the waiter on the pronunciation of the wine Merlot (it's Mer-loh).
Mainly what that tells us is that you're an uncivilized lout; no reasonable person would stoop to engaging in discussions about French pronunciation with a waiter.
I think the FSF could not have wished for a better means by which to illustrate the importance of GPLv3. Prior to this, free software developers, even those who have been using the GPL in the past, have been somewhat undecided about GPLv3. I think the Microsoft-Novell deal makes it pretty clear that the GPLv2 has loopholes that need to be addressed.
If you live in a highly litigious country and you make your living doing something which might be cross to Microsoft's purposes they could sue you whether they have grounds to do so or not
And, in that case, it still doesn't matter whether you use Linux or not because, as you say yourself, Microsoft can sue you anyway.
We aren't talking about credit, we're talking about control. And the FSF controls a lot of the software that ships with Linux, and they will continue to do so as long as they are doing a good job.
Look at it this way: Microsoft paid Novell $240m and gave them a license to their patents. Novell didn't even admit patent infringement, but even if they did, so what? If someone gives me $240m and a license, I'll take the deal--there is no downside.
The Microsoft-Novell deal is meaningless except as a PR stunt. And even at that, it looks like it's backfiring.
The only problem with the deal is that people like you keep spreading FUD based on it, positing risks and possibilities that are completely unrealistic. I don't know whether you actually work for Microsoft, but you might as well.
There are several Linux distros for Mac hardware, just install one of those. I'd give regular Ubuntu a choice, and if that's too heavy-weight, try Xubuntu.
Ubuntu comes with a lot of software pre-installed, it feels a lot more responsive than OS X on the same hardware, and it has very much a Mac-like feel. I'm running it on an old iMac and have been quite happy with it.
Give the man a cookie. Finally, someone who actually understands the purpose of patents. The whole deal, here, is that, in the past, people just kept their inventions secret if they could. The end result? Techniques could die with their inventor (read about Damascus steel for a great example of this). And, as you say, meanwhile people have to duplicate the effort.
And where is the evidence that the system is working? In practice, it looks like companies are primarily using software patents to protect (1) things they have to disclose anyway as part of doing business, (2) application areas without actually disclosing how to do anything, and (3) ideas that are basically just straightforward engineering.
Patent protection keeps other people from using their own ideas and the results of their own labor. That is something extraordinary, and it should require extraordinary evidence to keep it in place. So far, software patent proponents have provided not a shred of evidence that software patents are beneficial.
An outright "No Software Patents" stance would say that any company could then duplicate the oil company's unique software, leaving them no protection for their massive investment and intellectual property.
Sure: they can keep it a trade secret. In fact, that's what they're going to be doing anyway, while only disclosing patents that are so vague as to be useless when the patent protection runs out.
If we remove all software patents, we also remove part of the incentive for large corporations to invest in software.
Most of the great software inventions we use today were developed long before software patents even existed. And most software today would be developed whether or not it is patentable, including the oil company software you mention above, because companies don't have a choice.
Your argument is as stupid as if you were trying to argue that companies wouldn't have customer service or send invoices or pay bill unless they can patent the methods to do so. Of course they'd do all those things, simply because they have to do in order to do business.
IBM can afford to shrug off Microsoft's FUD campaign,
If it really is a "FUD campaign" (and it is), then so can you.
It makes little difference what the text of the Novell deal with Microsoft says. Microsoft paid a net of several hundred million dollars to Novell. With that, it is pointless for Microsoft to argue that Novell paid money to license Microsoft's patents. Heck, if Microsoft pays me $240m, I'll go a step further and actually admit to infringing on Microsoft's patents, provided Microsoft gives me the same perpetual license they have given Novell.
Microsoft can pay other people to sign contracts until their bank account is empty and it's meaningless. The only thing that means anything at all (and even then, not much) is if someone admits patent infringement and then pays Microsoft a substantial net amount of money to license the patent.
These guys deserve to get paid for such a beautiful and consistent API, unlike Microsoft and much of the free software out there.
What kind of fairy-tale land do you live in? Why do you think Qt is as mature as it is? It's because of the feedback and contributions from large numbers of open source developers. If the KDE guys hadn't wasted their time on Troll Tech's software and instead rallied around Gtk, Gtk would be as "beautiful and consistent" as Qt.
Software gets valuable by being used, and Troll Tech has gotten many times their value back compared to what they have made available. It's been a lousy deal for users.
But that does not mean Qt is not the best toolkit there is, or that money spent on it are not well spent.
Neither Gtk nor Qt are "the best toolkit there is" by a long shot.
And even if you limit yourself to C++ toolkits, Qt simply isn't worth the extra money compared to free alternatives like Gtkmm and wxWidgets.