whatever [LWN.net]

whatever

Posted Nov 6, 2006 8:28 UTC (Mon) by drag (subscriber, #31333)
In reply to: SuSE's death by epeeist
Parent article: Various responses to Microsoft/Novell

Mono isn't any more or less 'tainted' then any other thing.

Samba is much more of a risk then Mono, but I haven't heard anybody try to claim that those developers want to go work for Microsoft.

Seriously. Don't you understand how software patents work and people like Bruce Perens go on and on about the threats.

EVERYTHING VIOLATES PATENTS. Not for a fact, but if I assume that all Linux projects violate patents I will be right probably more then 90% of the time.

The Linux kernel violates patents.

KDE violates patents.

Gnome violates patents.

Apache violates patents.

Gstreamer violates patents.

And KDE 4 will violate patents, as will Qt4.

Do I know which specific patents. No. But that doesn't matter because I have a pretty decent idea about how software patents work and I know about the vast number of patents and It's about as a accurate as guess as:
'the sky will be blue tomorrow and the sun will be yellow, unless it's overcast then everything will be sorta gray'

Ragging on Mono for possible violations completely and 100% ignores the larger issues with software patents and Free software. In fact Mono is probably safer because your going to have a hard time, as Microsoft, convincing a judge that it's OK to release documentation on a programming language with the intention of creating a standard and hide any patents so that other people can adopt it so later on you can sue them and destroy them.

In the past with companies like Cisco creating standards they told everybody what patents they have over that standard.

People like Samba or OpenOffice.org or Abiword is at a much higher threat because they are implimenting features and capabilities of Microsoft's software were Microsoft never intended to have anybody else use.

Cross patent licensing deals is 100% natural and for Novell. They are a pro-software patent company like IBM or Oracle or the majority of large corporate software makers. Since they know they can't avoid violating patents they do cross-patent licensing with everybody else as a standard way to defend against patent litigation. This is normal.

It's VERY obvious that they didn't consult with Miguel or any other linux developers they employ. Each one says they didn't know about it until a few days before the announcement.

As far as Suse goes.. Everybody seems to completely ignore the fact that Suse was halfway propriatory company anyways. They tried the old thing were they added propriatory software to Linux to try to make it worth paying for. Now OpenSuse is completely Free as is Yast now open.

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whatever

Posted Nov 6, 2006 16:10 UTC (Mon) by dbreakey (guest, #1381) [Link]

A lot of people seem to forget what the problems with patents really are. To summarize, as far as I know, the essential problem is as follows:

A specific implementation (eg: the precise code used to actually implement something) can be copyrighted.
A patent, on the other hand, protects the idea—regardless of implmentation.

With a copyright, all you need to do is figure out a new way of accomplishing the same end result. A patent removes that option because the concept rather than the implementation is protected.

Another part of the problem is that patents are granted in much the same way as copyrights—namely, far too easily. There are hundreds, probably thousands of examples that were granted that fail the non-obviousness requirement of a typical patent (generally accepted to mean that a patentable invention must be non-obvious to an experienced member—ie: of typical expertise—of the relevant field).

Part of the issue here is simply the fact that the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office is both woefully understaffed and are now expected to have expertise in a range of fields that are far outside of their experience. Hence patents are often granted, that shouldn't be, simply because they don't have the time or expertise necessary to evaluate them properly.