Linux Foundation to Microsoft: stop secretly attacking Linux (ars Technica) [LWN.net]

ars Technica discusses comments from the Linux Foundation's Jim Zemlin to Microsoft. "Zemlin's comments about Microsoft are a response to a patent auction carried out by Microsoft to sell a number of patents that the company allegedly said were related to Linux. The patents, which were originally obtained by Microsoft from SGI, were sold to Allied Security Trust (AST), a patent-holding group that grants its members perpetual licenses before reselling the patents. Zemlin suggests that Microsoft's intention was to surreptitiously slip the intellectual property to a patent troll that would then go after Linux companies."

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Linux Foundation to Microsoft: stop secretly attacking Linux (ars Technica)

Posted Sep 10, 2009 18:57 UTC (Thu) by Trelane (guest, #56877) [Link] (2 responses)

Mmm. The comments remind me why I'm not subscribed to Ars. Long live lwn!!

Linux Foundation to Microsoft: stop secretly attacking Linux (ars Technica)

Posted Sep 11, 2009 6:43 UTC (Fri) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (1 responses)

The linux episteme forum is very good. Also Ars has a good IRC channel,
although I have not visited it in a long while.

Also a lot of the articles are informative and you get a wide variety of
different views from lots of very highly skilled technical people.

You just have to ignore the occasional troll and its interesting.

Linux Foundation to Microsoft: stop secretly attacking Linux (ars Technica)

Posted Sep 11, 2009 14:48 UTC (Fri) by Trelane (guest, #56877) [Link]

That's not really how I've found it to be, actually. It seems pretty much chock-a-brock full with Windows and Mac zealots. Maybe the linux forum is better; I've never really used it.

The hardware articles can be pretty good and the "Open Ended" articles can be fantastic (although much too far between) but the rest can pretty much be dumped IMHO.

Let's look more closely at OIN's involvement

Posted Sep 10, 2009 22:52 UTC (Thu) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link] (6 responses)

We know that OIN is backed by the largest patent holders in the world. They are only out to protect Linux and Open Source as long as that protection doesn't get in the way of their being able to get and enforce software patents.

Just now, governments are considering increases in software patenting in Europe and worldwide harmonization with US-style software patenting.

So, now we have this convenient story that benevolent Linux sympathizers picked up the patents that Microsoft intended to slip to a troll company and transferred them to benevolent OIN, first granting themselves perpetual licenses.

See, governments? Linux and Open Source don't need to be protected from software patenting! We, the benevolent multinational computer companies, will protect them ourselves, operating entirely inside of the patent system!

Once they get the laws they want, we're toast.

New company?

Posted Sep 10, 2009 23:26 UTC (Thu) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link] (4 responses)

Hey, Bruce, let's start a new company. Elevator pitch is: Free Software patent pool by day, patent troll by night.

Step one: buy up really marginal, low-quality, smelly patents. You know, the stuff that any greybeard could find prior art for in a back issue of _Bell System Unix Technology Quarterly_ without even putting down his moo shu pork. Patents that make even a patent troll laugh.

Step two: out-license the patents for Free Software implementation, asking only that the projects give us our "props" in their READMEs (not mentioning the actual patent numbers). That takes all the people who have a strong interest in showing the patents to be bogus, and makes them either no longer care or be on our side. Heck, Groklaw might even run a story on how we have all these totally strong patents and all should ph33r us.

I know you're on Slashdot, so I know you know what step three is. License the entire portfolio to proprietary software companies for a reasonable (to us) fee. The more dusty file cabinets full of patents we buy up, the more reasonable it looks. Tell them that the Free Software implementations are covered but they have to pay up. Send out fake invoices as junk mail like the skeevy domain name registrars use. Get into OSBC and OSCON as panelists, and pay our hedge fund investors huge returns until the entire proprietary software industry is _begging_ to have us shut down.

New company?

Posted Sep 11, 2009 1:29 UTC (Fri) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link]

And we could call it OIN. Need a time machine, though. We already know we'll find one. :-)

New company?

Posted Sep 11, 2009 12:33 UTC (Fri) by zotz (guest, #26117) [Link] (2 responses)

Variation:

1. Buy any patent you can related to software.
2. Grant a non-revocable, perpetual license to all Free Software (careful with the definition here to prevent hi-jinks) and only Free Software.
3. Sell the right to license these patents to the highest bidder on a *yearly* basis and keep a decent sized percentage to fund the purchase of new patents and the development of Free Software. (Restrict the term length of the licenses they can grant to 3 to 5 years.)

Anything missing?

drew

New company?

Posted Sep 11, 2009 13:15 UTC (Fri) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link] (1 responses)

You don't grant a blanket license to "all Free Software." You send permission letters to one project at a time, and require the maintainer to put in a notice in the project man pages, README, and online docs. Each letter covers the entire patent portfolio, so a future maintainer won't say, "hey, that patent is expired, we can take that paragraph out of the docs now."

If someone forked the project, he or she could take out the notice, since you can't put an additional term in the license to keep it there.

This is different from OIN: OIN is companies that practice patents protecting themselves; this company would be an aggressive troll, looking for high yields, and just use Free Software licensing to clean up crappy patents and protect them from a common source of prior art research.

New company?

Posted Sep 11, 2009 14:24 UTC (Fri) by zotz (guest, #26117) [Link]

*I guess we need two companies then.*

I like the idea of granting a blanket license to "all Free Software."

Perhaps it is OK to make it a condition to include the notice of the grant in the file.

If a notice is contemplated, a cleaner way to deal with the permissions other than on a patent by patent basis is likely needed.

drew

Let's look more closely at OIN's involvement

Posted Sep 11, 2009 7:36 UTC (Fri) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

> Once they get the laws they want, we're toast.

Just like any other thing, laws are for sale. Not surprising at all.

Linux Foundation to Microsoft: stop secretly attacking Linux (ars Technica)

Posted Sep 11, 2009 5:30 UTC (Fri) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link] (7 responses)

This and this [http://lwn.net/Articles/351532/] sort of thing could be the basis for some nice FUD against Microsoft - that they no longer believe in their own products and are resorting to desperate moves against the competition :)

Microsoft believing in their own products

Posted Sep 11, 2009 18:16 UTC (Fri) by clugstj (subscriber, #4020) [Link] (6 responses)

No rational person could believe in Microsoft's products. Just a few minutes ago I pasted plain text into Outlook, moved the cursor to inside the pasted text, Pressed the spacebar to add a space and the font size of all the pasted text increased?! How the heck can you even create a bug like that?

I've been writing software for 25 years and the bugs they manage to ship amaze me.

Microsoft believing in their own products

Posted Sep 11, 2009 18:27 UTC (Fri) by jmm82 (guest, #59425) [Link] (5 responses)

That is not a bug, it is a feature. You paid extra for that.

Microsoft believing in their own products

Posted Sep 11, 2009 19:54 UTC (Fri) by jordanb (guest, #45668) [Link] (4 responses)

Microsoft usability testing found that 68% of people want to change the text size after pasting something, so they simply made the next keystroke after pasting do that.

It's the kind of usability insight that can only be gleaned from expensive testing supported by large corporations.

It's why Linux has no hope on the desktop.

Microsoft believing in their own products

Posted Sep 12, 2009 5:54 UTC (Sat) by speedster1 (guest, #8143) [Link]

What an insightful explanation!

Are you sure Microsoft actually paid big bucks for that usability testing though? Perhaps this feature resulted from data-mining the detailed Outlook usage statistics gathered from millions of Windows computers that phone home to pick up the latest security updates...

Microsoft believing in their own products

Posted Sep 14, 2009 11:31 UTC (Mon) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link] (2 responses)

Leaving aside the baffling question of why anyone would want that - even after determining that 68% of people want to change the size, how could it know what they want to change the size to?

And if they always want to change it to the same size, why is that not the default font size in the first place?

Outlook's pasting behaviour makes me want to stab myself in the face.

Microsoft believing in their own products

Posted Sep 14, 2009 11:44 UTC (Mon) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link] (1 responses)

I detect a certain note of irony in the OP's comment...

Microsoft believing in their own products

Posted Sep 14, 2009 14:46 UTC (Mon) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]

I am no longer capable of detecting irony in reference to Microsoft. Sad but true.

Linux Foundation to Microsoft: stop secretly attacking Linux (ars Technica)

Posted Sep 15, 2009 10:53 UTC (Tue) by berndp (guest, #52035) [Link]

From a German webmagazine/Forum (thus the surrounding text is in German):
http://www.pcgames.de/aid,694750/Windows-7-Microsoft-mach...

In short: Slides to "motivate" sales people to tell customer wrong negative so-called facts about Linux. The presentation as such (in English) starts at
http://www.pcgames.de/aid,694750/Windows-7-Microsoft-mach...