Novell, buyer's remorse, and the patent threat

Novell, buyer's remorse, and the patent threat

Posted Nov 23, 2006 14:09 UTC (Thu) by Liefting (subscriber, #8466)
In reply to: Novell, buyer's remorse, and the patent threat by dion
Parent article: Novell, buyer's remorse, and the patent threat

Even if some, or most of the patents are indeed junk and are easily (but expensively) refuted through prior art, I think that some of the Microsoft patents are really defendable. Microsoft *did* come up with original ideas, and that's what patents are supposed to protect.

One of the things that could conceivably be covered by a whole load of *legitimate* (not in the legal sense, but in the "honest" sense) MS patents would be Microsoft networking. Especially the combination of TCP/IP, NetBIOS, SMB, Active Directory, Kerberos and a few other things that all tied together in a specific way provide something called 'Single Signon' to all sorts of servers. There are some really clever ideas there which I doubt you'd be able to find prior art (working implementations) for.

The obvious piece of OSS software that would be impacted by this is Samba, but the smbfs filesystem is part of the Linux kernel as well. Easily ripped out though, but still...

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