Quiet armament from a not-so-retired Bill Gates
WE PREVIOUSLY summarised Microsoft's plan against Free software. It's about software patents and there is a lot going on in Kirkland (Washington) and Bellevue, however quietly.
The patent applications, made public today, were filed by Searete LLC, which is part of Intellectual Ventures, the Bellevue-based invention house and patent company. Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft’s former chief technology officer, runs Intellectual Ventures and is also named among the inventors on the electromagnetic-engine patent applications.
That suggests the filings resulted from one of Intellectual Ventures' brainstorming sessions, in which Gates has been known to participate.
Novell, as Phelps highlights and which CNET recently noted, is an exception to this rule, having approached Microsoft.
As with Novell, Phelps routinely neglects to mention facts that might cast Microsoft's IP actions in anything less than a warm and glowing light. For instance, he talks up Microsoft's generous decision to share 30,000 pages of technical documentation, conveniently forgetting to mention that the action was spurred by its desire to get out from under the European Commission's antitrust eye. (It didn't quite work.)
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The cheek Phelps uses here is breathtaking. First of all, he reiterates over and over throughout the book that Microsoft is a regular target for firms claiming Microsoft's technology violates their IP, suggesting that Microsoft may be the one with an IP problem, not open source, which has almost never been the subject of an IP-infringement lawsuit.
Except those funded (or started, as in TomTom) by Microsoft, of course, as SCO's failed suit against Novell appears to have been. In other words, this pitch-black Microsoft pot is calling a nearly lily-white kettle black, even as it attempts to smear the kettle with black paint.
This is galling in the extreme.
Ironically, Phelps suggests that the open-source charm offensive was all about providing interoperability to customers, but then declares two pages later that IP license agreements "wouldn't solve the interoperability problem." Well, of course not. But then, it's not really about interoperability. Patents are not critical to interoperability, as Microsoft's deal with Red Hat demonstrates.
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In other words, the old Microsoft seemed to be doing quite well before Phelps made it an active patent tax collector.
On this special show, we talk about the Microsoft/TomTom settlement and interview Linux Basement’s Chad Wollenberg on open source in schools.
In addition to being an out-of-date filesystem which Microsoft is suing companies over left and right, FAT has some other serious limitations, one of which is a 4GB file size limit. I'm sure at some point, Bill Gates said "4GB ought to be enough for anybody." ;) Other filesystems which are similarly limited include HFS and ReiserFS.
So, in my view, the OSI should not give in to this blackmail, but should stand firm on the fundamental principle that software patents are an unmitigated harm for free software. It should reject the current proposed licence, and insist that if the MPEG Working Group wishes to benefit from open source, it should play by open source's rules.
When you extend so that they can use the extensions themselves rather easily.. but you can't use their extensions, that is called helping them even further.
What you want to do is to use a platform that is significantly different, one Monopolysoft can't leverage nearly as much as they can leverage "dotnet".
Of course, if the mono folks were truly focused on achieving major migrations away from MSdotnet, that may yield some fruit. I think that is a losing effort or at least is inefficient (unless Microsoft were paying you to do that.. riiight) .. and still helps Microsoft more than if they seriously forked from the "standard" or just used something else.
Are the mono folks going to continue to push silver/moonlight? Do they persist on helping Microsoft? Are they in denial over the bits revealed by the TomTom episode?
Microsoft doesn't have a chance at reason until after they have lost their monopolies and suffered for a while longer. And the mono folks and Novell just aren't convincing.
Please go on to give Ms a stronghold in the FLOSS world... I do not a know thing that have been more destructive for FLOSS than Mr. Icaza. His never ending effort to make MS technology dominate in the FLOSS world is just sad to see.
why Miguel has been to boastful of MONO/.NET lately. He's trying to cover up those who have actually tried Silverlight/.NET and DUMPED it like the POS it is. I tip my hat to MLB.com for seeing at least some light and went to flash.
there are way to many clueless people in linux.
if u want to not get warts use KDE.
The Taiwanese company Elan Microelectronics has sued Apple, alleging infringement of two of its touch screen patents, an Elan spokesman said Wednesday.