An additional note

An additional note

Posted Oct 12, 2007 22:12 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091)
In reply to: An additional note by kripkenstein
Parent article: Patent Infringement Lawsuit Filed Against Red Hat and Novell - Just Like Ballmer Predicted (Groklaw)

As somebody else has suggested above, Red Hat can buy the patent and put it in the public domain (or give it to OIN). Alternatively they can work around the patent so their product does not infringe anymore (even if they have to settle for their previous use). Or IBM and OIN and other powerful friends can convince them to forgive about the patent: even if the company has no products I bet they can be sued for a lot of things (and IBM can darken the skies with lawyers of whatever dirty hole they come out of). All of this is considering that the patent is really valid; a stronger argument is to invalidate the patent.

Some day somebody will find an unavoidable patent that is valid beyond doubt and all Linux distributors are found to infringe, like "method and apparatus for writing a monolithic kernel in C" (filed in 1981), or something. That day there will be a big party at Microsoft HQ. I would bet that GNU/Linux is so big nowadays that this patent would lead to a huge patent reform. Until that moment we can only speculate, and fight software patents in Europe.

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