novell die-off imminent? [LWN.net]

novell die-off imminent?

Posted Nov 7, 2006 21:35 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333)
In reply to: novell die-off imminent? by bronson
Parent article: On Novell and Microsoft

Patents are a problem for ALL Free software.

With Mono your going to be relatively safe. Just don't use any of the parts of Mono that aren't C# proper.

The thing is that it's a published standard, put out by Microsoft, for other people to use. If they were to all of a sudden go after patent infrigments they would have to explain why the hell they disclosed all this information on C# and all of a sudden decided to sue people when they made no mention of any patents before this.

Other companies that disclose patent-encumbered "standards", like Cicso and their networking stuff, always declare what patents they care about and were you can go to pay the licensing fees.

So using Mono is safer then:
Mono is safer then OpenOffice.org
Mono is safer then Koffice
Mono is safer then Firefox
Mono is safer then QT
Mono is safer then the Linux kernel
Mono is safer then Samba

So you better strip all those things out of your distribution.

Because undoubtedly those are violating somebody's patents somewere and the likelihood that one of multiple of them could be owned by Microsoft is pretty high. And with those, especially with anything that deals with Windows file and protocol compatability, was made in a way that was entirely unnaproved by Microsoft and does things that they very much dislike.

Saying we should avoid mono because of possible patents owned by Microsoft is like saying "I should cut off my thumb becuase it might have cancer in it"

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novell die-off imminent?

Posted Nov 7, 2006 23:20 UTC (Tue) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

After having seen "than" misspelled as "then" in six sentences in a row, I went berserk and uninstalled mono on all machines where I have root access. Poor beagle and tomboy - they were killed too as collateral damage.

novell die-off imminent?

Posted Nov 7, 2006 23:28 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Your loss then.

novell die-off imminent?

Posted Nov 8, 2006 2:11 UTC (Wed) by avik (subscriber, #704) [Link]

You mean than.

novell die-off imminent?

Posted Nov 8, 2006 7:16 UTC (Wed) by Ross (subscriber, #4065) [Link]

Just FYI, patents are by definition publicly disclosed, and there is no obligation to not include them in standards. What is considered unfair is making something a standard while secretly pursuing patent protection, only to spring it later when it is too late to stop using the standard. Illegal? Maybe, maybe not. It depends on what kind of agreements were in place when the company joined the standards body.

novell die-off imminent?

Posted Nov 9, 2006 9:53 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Ya the patent is still valid if you do it, but you can't do things like sue for damages.

Sure the patents are disclosed, but the pratical limitations for programmers to understand patents of find the violating patent out of the tens, if not hundreds, of thousand other software patents is very unlikely.

The Laches defense kicks in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laches_%28equity%29

And if I understand with patents you still keep it, but you loose a lot of rights. Generally what you could expect to happen is that if Microsoft decided to sue Mono developers then the court would eventually just give Mono developers a period of time to correct the patent violations or start paying licensing fees.

Microsoft won't be able to claim that Mono was hiding stuff from them or whatnot. Mono is very open with Microsoft and do presentations in .NET confrences and that sort of thing.

Also mono is partially attempting to promote C# by making it cross-platform. So in effect it's kinda benifiting Microsoft.

Now in comparision look at Samba. This has definately damaged Microsoft's market share. Plenty of Linux boxes running samba have saved many many people the cost of paying Microsoft. Microsoft refuses to release documentation based on 'IP' issues, and has no interest in interlopy with other systems. Their versions of SMB were never intended to work with anything but Microsoft software.

So with SMB2 with Vista and such Linux has support for that BEFORE Vista even gets released to the public. So this stuff has been reversed engineered from software provided for Microsoft associated developers. I am sure that in the legal agreements and EULA hell associated with MS beta programs probably forbid stuff like that.

So the likelyhood of Microsoft actually inflicting serious damage into Samba through a patent violation is much much higher then with Mono.

Of course I will happily use Samba. I am not scared of potential patent lawsuites. If Microsoft starts throwing around the patent nulcear bomb it's going to be the business equivelent of WW3. A feeding frenzy. It's just as likely that MS will end up dead as much as any other company. Free software and Linux is going to survive no matter what the hell happens. It's a bit like coachroaches in this manner.

(and despite my psuedo-defending Mono and Novell, my personal preference is Python and Debian)

novell die-off imminent?

Posted Nov 16, 2006 12:49 UTC (Thu) by gwg (guest, #20811) [Link]

> So this stuff has been reversed engineered from software provided for
> Microsoft associated developers. I am sure that in the legal agreements
> and EULA hell associated with MS beta programs probably forbid stuff like that.

Probably, but (as far as I can tell) it doesn't apply, because Samba is being done in Australia, and the Copyright Amendment (Computer Programs) Bill 1999 exempts people from such EULA terms, if the reverse engineering is for the purpose of study, security or software compatibility.