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On Mon, 14 May 2007 09:28:26 +0100 "Jonathan Roberts" <jonathan.roberts.uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Yeah, I know this comes up from time to time and it may well never > happen, but there's an interesting article over at Forbes business > week: > > http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/05/28/100033867/ > > It's long. It's about patents and it's actually a pretty good read. I agree - but those who do read it should ensure that they read beyond the first page. The headlines and FUD from Microsoft only obscure the issue. IMHO 238 is not a breathtaking number - especially when you consider that Debian has 19,000 packages. It's not 238 in the linux kernel (only 42 and none of those are proven), it is 238 across maybe 23,000 packages all over the internet. See: http://www.hezmatt.org/~mpalmer/blog/general/a_lesson_in_critical_reading.html "Personally, I think that if Microsoft ever does starts with a patent smackdown, it won't be 235 patents, it'll be two or three, the strongest ones they can find, and 90 minutes after the plaintiff(s) is/are served the infringing code will be history, and we'll go back to living our lives as normal. That's even assuming that the patents are legit, which is by no means a given (even with the US' insanely broad patent provisions). As the linked article explains, the US Supreme Court has started getting a bit noisy on the subject of over-broad and pointless software patents, so perhaps Microsoft is just getting it's licks in before the Supremes take it's noisy rattle away from it." > In > my opinion, or what I've read so far, they paint free software in a > very favourable light Only because of Richard Stallman's fanaticism in dealing with threats like patents via the GPL. Some have mocked RMS for his one-track obsession but even if you don't agree with everything he's said, you have to acknowledge his impact on free software. Imagine what it would be like now if we had no GPL, no gcc, no Ogg Vorbis or other free codecs and libraries. If people had said that open-source is sufficient and freedom wasn't important - that proprietary code is OK as long as they are nice to us. Poppycock. Don't put up with proprietary code (like Flash and RealPlayer), it'll be taken off you soon enough with patents anyway so get used to the free replacements and help them to improve. The article does set out how RMS "anticipated 20 years ago all the threats free software faces today. Foremost among those threats, Stallman understood, were patents." It is better to have a machine that doesn't do everything than to have a machine that makes you liable for a lawsuit. Whether or not the patents are valid, individual free software developers are not going to be able to fight the claims in court (especially as these are American courts). Far more likely that the code will be rewritten and what cannot be rewritten (because we don't have the source code) will be dumped. > and I think suggest that if Microsoft were to > sue over patent infringement free software stands a good chance of > winning any such case... Not to mention that these contested patents could only be enforceable in the USA and even in the USA the Supreme Court appears to be backtracking over just how extensive software patents can be before becoming unenforceable. That and the problem that a lot of Microsoft's 'patents' were filed very late and leave room for prior art. Even so, the patent battle will impact on every free software user - the more proprietary rubbish that you use, the more you will be affected. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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