07.22.08
Intellectual Monopolists Unite
Patents owned and covered only by the few domain giants
A bit of a controversy erupted a month ago when several large vendors had entered a ‘patent pool’ agreement, whereby only wealthy corporations are covered while excluding all the rest. It appears to be happening once again.
Sipro Lab Telecom (Sipro), the G.729 Patent Pool Licensing Administrator, is pleased to announce that Toshiba Corporation has joined the G.729 Consortium. The G.729 Consortium now represents and pools together the intellectual property rights (IPR) essential to this ITU-T standard of France Telecom, Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation Universite de Sherbrooke, and Toshiba Corporation — all recognized industry leaders in the area of speech coding and processing solutions.
The case of Novell/Microsoft is very much related to such ‘pools’. Over the years, owing to Novell’s long history, the company has expanded its patent portfolio. It’s still applying for them — which is an adversity in the eyes of FOSS spirit. This can be used to ensure that no other companies enter the scene (Canonical for example). That’s just what Novell tried to do with Microsoft.
Sadly enough, to paraphrase Asay, IBM keep “feeding Novell”. If the theory is correct, then IBM, Microsoft and Novell were all deeply involved when they arranged the marriage of software patents and spplied them to GNU. Here is an interesting perspective:
IBM has long looked to Novell to serve as a buffer to Red Hat’s growing dominance. Years ago, IBM invested $50 million in Novell. More recently, IBM selected Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise for its Cognos 8 mainframe debut. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is planned to join SLES in the future.
Why does IBM favour a Microsoft partner over a genuine GNU/Linux player in this case? If this persists, then IBM becomes part of the problem. █
