Comments on: Intellectual Monopolies: Microsoft, McCain, Trade Secrets, and Apple

By: AlexH

AlexH — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 07:38:28 +0000

Neither of you are correct.

OIN has a membership in terms of licensees, but they are not “protected”, they have licences.

OIN protects the list of software that make up a good proportion of standard GNU/Linux systems, including desktops. Those software projects may or may not be related to the licencees or the founding organisations, and OIN is bound to protect them in either scenario.

So, OIN broadly protects the community, but only extends that to an exhaustive list.

By: Roy Schestowitz

Roy Schestowitz — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 05:58:00 +0000

OIN ‘protects’ its members just like ay other patent umbrella/pool. It shows the deficiencies of the system in general (rendering the notion of patenting moot).

By: Jose_X

Jose_X — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 01:19:35 +0000

The transparencies can be hooked up to music. They can be hooked up to alarms or to any sort of output or state from the application running on the window (eg, input is desired or particular output) or to something more general (like you have been ignoring the window for a while).

..variable transparencies on the same window at the same time (function of space).

Other things can also be done besides transparencies.

Think of any video game, application, or anything else and extend it to windows or to other class of software.

This whole patent business is an illness. I really hope society recovers. Patents enforced will kill creativity and lots of interesting products, businesses, and hobbies/human interactions, especially those closely connected with FOSS.

BTW, the OIN doesn’t protect against attacks to anyone for any and all FOSS projects, right?

By: Jose_X

Jose_X — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 00:58:16 +0000

I would appreciate it if patents with ideas that might not be implemented in the FOSS are not shown on BN in summaries. Patents are a POS. I don’t like to read anything from or about a patent unless it is obvious garbage. The variable transparency and colors for windows is a ridiculous thing to give anyone a patent over, but some might claim it is a novel idea if it’s not out in the wild yet.

I’d hate to stop reading BN because of this kind of exposed junk.

[Apologies in this case if those features (the transparency in particular) are out in products. Also, it only makes sense too to have knobs to adjust the transparency on a per window (window group) basis.]