It’s not really a separate issue, from a legal perspective. If permissive grants are in effect which render all applicable patent claims non-actionable, then in essence, the patents are worthless (that’s an overstatement–more accurately, they are worthless as a leverage to force adoption of a specific implementation of the technology under threat of legal action).

Care to speculate the answer if the question had been, say, “How about releasing the Exchange specs so open-source mail apps can talk to it”?

Noted. Sorry for any confusion.

“There is a substantive effort in open source to bring such an
implementation of .Net to market, known as Mono and being driven by
Novell, and one of the attributes of the agreement we made with Novell
is that the intellectual property associated with that is available to
Novell customers.”

It doesn’t sound like Novell alone merely “solidified’ anything.

it only solidifies certain grants to Novell as a privileged contractor

Point of note: Microsoft and Novell do not have any access to each others’ patents – their customers do (as a common tactic in messy patent trolling is to target USERS of an ‘infringing’ technology, not those who put it there; see Trend Micro versus Barracura RE ClamAV)

It is not “exclusionary,” per se, it’s just delimited in scope. In other words, the Novell contract doesn’t *invalidate* (“exclude”) prior grants, it only solidifies certain grants to Novell as a privileged contractor (whether that is a good or bad thing is a separate issue–and I have a feeling I would probably agree with your conclusions on that particular issue). But the point here is that MS has effectively waived all claims (yes, I know they still hold the IP, but we’re talking actionable claims here) to the core technologies behind mono and pnet. So what we have, when it’s all boiled down, is a copy-left license with future-safety. It’s not free-as-in-freedom, but it is free-as-in-beer–and that’s a *huge* point in this whole dialog.

“Oh,” some say, “that was just the statement of a random developer–it’s not binding.” Sorry, but that “random developer” is one of the *holders* of the patents(!); furthermore, he was speaking in his official capacity as a MS spokesperson–his word is gold.

Yet further, silly quibbles about the tensing of his statement (“will be” vs. “are”) really don’t stand up, since the context indicates that the intent relates to the present (“have agreed”, past tense–”will be”, future tense == now). It’s no different than the GPL using phrases like “shall be deemed”–does that mean the GNU doesn’t really apply *now*? Of course not! Rather, it is using an ingressive nuance to convey the sense of ‘starting now, and including all times future to now’. This is quite obviously how the various legal advisors to different Linux distributions have interpreted the language, as verified by the inclusion of mono / pnet in those distributions.

The only patents to worry about in Moonlight 1.0 are the video/audio codecs, but well, duh. Nothing new there. If you want multimedia support (for the most common codecs) on Linux you either have to put yourself at legal risk or license them.

Honestly, all it would take is one organisation who decided on legal advice that it wasn’t free.

Here’s my reasoning. I agree that the words “free” or “non-free” are easily bandied about. What matters is the practice: do people get the four freedoms or not?

It’s very easy to blather on about patents as if it were the end of the world. If the people at the coal face – the people who would be the targets for legal action – are happy to distribute Moonlight, then to my mind the problem is basically inconsequential. That’s not to say that there is *no* risk of legal action (there’s always some risk with any software), but that those most at risk have decided for themselves the risk is acceptable.

<sarcasm>
And obviously you must also be behind the conspiracy that updated all the google links to the article Roy claims had its headline changed to purposely make Roy look like a lying idiot.
</sarcasm>

Roy: You lie so often you’ve started to believe your own bull, but the rest of us are fortunately a bit more intelligent than you.

I suppose it’s easier to suggest — true to his conspiracy theory form — that I support his apparent enemy, rather than to come to the conclusion that I merely choose not to support his distasteful, ignorant, unresearched, misguided and amateurish website and approach.

Clearly, because Roy isn’t capable of mounting a credible argument for his cause, I must be collaborating with the enemy. That is obviously the only supportable argument for disagreeing with Roy’s point of view!

“Why make it ugly when you can make a ‘plant’ surrender?”

Remember Icahn?

___
[+] Former Microsoft employees like Nathan Myhrvold:

http://boycottnovell.com/2008/05/09/intellectual-monopoly-miscellany/
http://boycottnovell.com/2008/05/08/intellectual-abuse-against-foss/

And others in Acacia too:

http://boycottnovell.com/2007/10/15/acacia-comparison-sco-connection/
http://boycottnovell.com/2007/10/17/oin-bully-troll-proxy/
http://boycottnovell.com/2007/10/18/sjvn-on-acacia/
http://boycottnovell.com/2007/10/18/patent-troll-intellectual-ventures/
http://boycottnovell.com/2007/10/20/acacia-novell-patent-moot/
http://boycottnovell.com/2007/10/22/lasuit-evolution-linux/
http://boycottnovell.com/2007/10/20/acacia-novell-patent-moot/
http://boycottnovell.com/2007/10/29/wipo-patent-threat/
http://boycottnovell.com/2007/10/29/patent-front-linux/
http://boycottnovell.com/2008/01/25/j-carl-cooper-and-ray-niro/

The obvious reason is that while Microsoft isn’t above using the threat of patents in it’s arguments, they dislike patents in general. Considering how often they’ve been the victim of them, I can’t blame them for disliking them.

Thanks for the link. Yes, I sent Groklaw some pointers to show what’s coming from Goldfarb’s mouth. This needs to be discussed and circulated more widely to increase people’s awareness before the Trojan horse gets past the gate.