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Going for the most cynical reading award...Going for the most cynical reading award...Posted Feb 22, 2008 16:44 UTC (Fri) by dwheeler (guest, #1216)In reply to: Going for the most cynical reading award... by justme Parent article: Microsoft announces changes to promote interoperability "anyone who codes to their API has to demonstrate that they clean-room reverse-engineered it or MS will make patent claims." Clean-room efforts have no effect on patents, and wouldn't help you. That's one of the reasons patents are insane for software; even if patents were only granted for truly new software ideas (something no patent system has even approached), and even if you did your best to not infringe, you'd still infringe. In fact, you could release code that didn't infringe a published patent (because the patent review was in process), and when the patent is published, you're suddenly liable (and you probably won't find out for years). If there were only a few patents a year that could apply to a program, you might still have a chance, but a typical system has millions of lines of code, and there are an absurd number of software patents.
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Going for the most cynical reading award... Posted Feb 22, 2008 17:16 UTC (Fri) by justme (guest, #19967) [Link] I stand corrected. So MS releasing its trade secrets creates no *new* poison pill; it was already there. It's amazing how software can simultaneously enjoy the protections of a trade secret, a publically available patented invention, a submarine patent application, a published copyrighted implementation, and now with DMCA a legally unbreakable encrypted blob all at the same time. Of course, Gates knew this when he lobbied for extending these protections to software decades ago...
Going for the most cynical reading award... Posted Feb 22, 2008 19:50 UTC (Fri) by dwheeler (guest, #1216) [Link] To be fair, Gates was against software patents many years ago, and publicly said so. At this point, I don't know if Microsoft has an official position. They probably view government market interference (in the form of software patents) as bad, but the only way they can prevent competition. If true competition were permitted, it would interfere with their 80-90% profit margins :-).
... being very cynical indeed Posted Feb 22, 2008 23:46 UTC (Fri) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] My impression is that Microsoft the software developer is not in favour of Software patents, since for anyone doing programming they represent at best a legal minefield. However, Microsoft has a large legal department, which gets to draft all its license agreements, and to make public statements about Microsoft policy. For such a department Software patents are an empire building opportunity, each new threat must be countered by hiring more lawyers, who report to Microsoft's head attorney, making him more important and powerful (and perhaps richer too). He has personally and in his role at Microsoft expressed strong support for such patents and for any other expansion in "intellectual property" using a variation of the broken window fallacy to justify them as economically positive. With Ballmer in control rather than Gates I'd say the emphasis on software development is over, and Microsoft has matured into a more typical company where the executives have a very limited grip on the nature of the company's core activities. Such a company is much more likely to use Software patents as a weapon, but correspondingly less likely to be able use this threat effectively. Actual patent lawsuits from Redmond would be a sign of weakness and should elicit cheers from everyone in the Free Software camp except the people whose doormats they actually land on.
Going for the most cynical reading award... Posted Feb 23, 2008 21:20 UTC (Sat) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] I think it was more accurate to view BG's viewpoint as (paraphrasing, of course): "If people knew then what they know now about software and patents then they could of shutdown software development as we currently know it. There is a distinct chance that a software company can patent something fundamental about software and we would be at their mercy. Therefore we need to get as many patents as possible." That was more or less what was said in a 1991 'Challenges and Strategy' memo BG sent out to the rest of the corporation. You can find the full text at: http://www.bralyn.net/etext/literature/bill.gates/challen... And see exactly what he said. The relevent text is about 2/3rds toward the bottom in the "Catagory 3" section. The thing about software vs other industry is the low overhead of praticipation. With the automobile industry, for example, you need to have millions ontop of millions of dollars in up front expenses to produce a car. You need to obtain suppliers, third party distributers, entire manufacturing plants, engineers, lawyers, artists, assembly line workers, etc etc. With software all you need to write industry software is intellegence and a PC. Your looking at 1/10000th the expense of praticipation. And OSS's goal in life is to make it cheaper, easier, to make software. A decade ago the cost to obtain enterprise-level development environment would be much more the cost of any computer. Now though you can get the source code to entire operating systems and some of the best development tools in the world for Free, all you need is a fast internet connection. So for a large software company this puts you in a very vunerable position, long term. Novell, SCO, Microsoft, etc etc, this does not matter. A small, very smart, and very agressive company with only a few hundred employees would be able to take any one of those companies out, theoreticly. So with software patents, since they cost so much in terms of overhead to obtain and patent agreements with other large software companies; this provides a very strong buffer against competition from small companies. So with a company in Microsoft's position you have no choice but to be on the side of software patents, even though you regularly get nailed by them to the tune of several million dollars every year by patent trolls. Your investors will not let you do anything else. They are the ones in control and you have no choice but to cater to them. The ultimate danger though is to the entire U.S.A. software industry. Smaller countries just now entering into the 'information technology' era will probably realise that software patents are a barrier to them and thus refuse to support them. Without the legal overhead these countries will be able to let their own companies do software development without these limitations. Once these companies get bigger then they would be able to go into the USA and other software patent-friendly countries and just start using their own innovations to get thousands of patents which they would use to attack companies like Microsoft, furthur limiting their ability to compete. They wouldn't even have to do it with their own legal teams... There are lots of patent troll corporations that would be happy to get their hands on a bunch of new software patents to begin extracting licensing fees from rich software companies on some foreign company's behalf.
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